The eye of the beholder

This post started out as an update to my previous post. But it just growed.

Ten years ago I wrote here (with reference to the word "pupil") 

<pre_script>
What do you see in someone's pupil? - an image of yourself, but tiny. A little person. (And the image of yourself is enhanced if the person into whose eyes you gaze has used belladonna to dilate the pupils; but bella donna, or 'beautiful woman', is another story. [HD 2022: new emphasis]) The Latin for 'little girl' is pupilla (French speakers will remember poupée; and the -illa ending is just a diminutive suffix.
 </pre_script>

Well, here it is – the other story. Etymonline entertains two explanations for the link between deadly nightshade (belladonna) and a beautiful woman (bella donna):

1590s, "deadly nightshade" (Atropa belladonna), from Italian, literally "fair lady" (see belle + Donna); the plant so called supposedly because women made cosmetic eye-drops from its juice (a mid-18c. explanation; atropic acid, found in the plant, has a well-known property of dilating the pupils) or because it was used to poison beautiful women (a mid-19c. explanation).

I favour the first, partly because it is what I was taught when I was studying this stuff, partly because it's what I used to tell students during my brief stint as an ESOL teacher, and partly because it just makes more sense:

<putative_monologue likelihood="-1">
There is this poisonous plant – what shall we call it? I know, let's use it only to poison beautiful women, and call it something fancy – Italian, maybe. Got it: bella donna!
</putative_monologue>

(19th century writers were just obsessed with poisoning beautiful women – I blame the parents.)

Belladonna came to mind because of the appearance of "kohl" in that list from the University of Ghent study...

<not_just_an_update>
(referred to here.)
</not_just_an_update>

...(keep UP won't you? "Words known better by [females] than by [males]") Kohl and belladonna aren't the same, but they're both eye-related cosmetics. And here's what Etymonline has to  say about "kohl" :

"powder used to darken the eyelids, etc.," properly of finely ground antimony, 1799, from Arabic kuhl (see alcohol).

And under  alcohol it says

1540s (early 15c. as alcofol), "fine powder produced by sublimation," from Medieval Latin alcohol "powdered ore of antimony," from Arabic al-kuhul "kohl," the fine metallic powder used to darken the eyelids, from kahala "to stain, paint." The al- is the Arabic definite article, "the."

<philological_aside source="Harmless Drudgery">
In an early post I wrote:

[T]he Moors who invaded Spain in the year 711 {and stayed there, in varying territories, for nearly 800 years} had Arabic as a second language and prepended the definite article to their nouns: that's why many Arabic borrowings in Spanish and Portuguese have an a[l]... tacked on at the beginning – sugar, for example, azucar/açúcar in Sp/Pg is zucchero in Italian, as the Arabs who invaded Sicily  had Arabic as their mother tongue.

 </philological_aside>

Paracelsus (1493-1541) used the word to refer to a fine powder but also a volatile liquid. By 1670s it was being used in English for "any sublimated substance, the pure spirit of anything," including liquids.

The sense of "intoxicating ingredient in strong liquor" is attested by 1753, short for alcohol of wine, which then was extended to "the intoxicating element in fermented liquors." The formerly preferred terms for the substance were rectified spirits ....

So the root of the word "alcohol" is cohol. But that makes no difference to what happens to  it when people want to coin new words, such as "workaholic" or "chocoholic".

<parenthesis>
A similar fate befell the pter (=wing; think of "pterodactytl" and "lepidoptera") of "helicopter". Any new flying machine (such as a "gyrocopter" or "quadcopter") is some sort of -copter; indeed, a helicopter is, colloquially, a "copter". Which, come to think of it, happened to "bus" (slightly differently, in that it chopped a whole word off [omni- , from the originally Latin omnibus – (="for all"}]) , leaving just part of the -ibus ending). This isn't the whole story though. Omnibus had already been imported intact into English as "omnibus", so there was no awareness that "bus" was just part of a case ending (-ibus, which can, in its native habitat, be appended to any third declension noun or adjective, vehicular or otherwise).

Ahem. Where was I? Oh yes, -oholic.
</parenthesis>

And further, like "copter" as a free-standing word, "holic" has now been seen as an admittedly jocular reference to addiction of any kind; probably, I've just realized, "shopaholism": 

(I'm not sure where this picture comes from. It was posted to a Facebook group with an international readership.)

Ho hum, there must be something that needs doing...

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