For many of you, our readers, a Sunday ritual will no doubt involve leisurely reading the magazine, whether leafing through the print pages at the breakfast table or scrolling online in bed.
If you have teenage boys in your household, their weekends might also be spent loading guns and filling magazines while playing online shooting games.
At first glance, the origin of the word “magazine” seems quite different from either definition. It can be traced back to Arabic: Makuzan “warehouse, granary,” plural Macazinfrom the root Khazanah “store”.
The resulting linguistic contact dates back to the early Islamic conquests and especially to the influence of Arabic culture and language that spread across Europe, Africa and Asia during the Islamic Golden Age from the 10th to the 14th centuries.
The oldest record is Macazin Latin in European languages Magazenum Built in 1228 as a warehouse in the port of Marseille, Italy magazineIt has been recorded since 1348.
Meanwhile, in the Muslim-dominated Iberian Peninsula, Andalusian Arabic Al Makhzan Enter as Spanish Almacen. Italian magazine 15th century French magazine “Warehouse, warehouse, store.”
From there the word entered English and was documented in 1451. This original meaning in English is no longer in use.
By the late 1500s, the meaning of “magazine” narrowed to refer to a building, room, or compartment (for example, on a ship) for storing weapons, ammunition, explosives, and other military supplies.
Then, after 1868, the military storage aspect of “magazine” was further specialized into the modern term referring to a removable container holding ammunition to be fed automatically into a repeating rifle or machine gun.
Meanwhile, it was only a matter of time before the word was used metaphorically from the 1600s onwards, suggesting an accumulation or repertoire of resources, ideas, and rhetorical weapons.
This meaning became quite specific at one time, referring to books that provided information on a particular subject or for a particular group of people (for example, “The Mariners’ Magazine”).
Regularly published collections of carefully selected material to appeal to particular interests have been known as periodicals since the 1600s.
The first time they were called magazines was in 1731 by the English publisher Edward Cave in his The Gentleman’s Magazine, “a monthly collection, as a magazine, treasured together of the most notable works, or at least impartial abridgements thereof, on the above subjects.”
This designation was accepted in contrast to book publishing.
Starting next month, this column will no longer be available in Post Magazine stores, but our repertoire of language musings will continue elsewhere, so keep Language Matters part of your lifestyle.
