To boldly hit “print.”

Dear Word Detective:  Recently, I got to wondering about the word “font.” There are several definitions, including a baptismal “font,” a typeface and someone, like yourself, a “font” of wisdom. I can accept that there might be some similarity between a baptismal font (water being splashed about generously) and a “font of wisdom” (wisdom being splashed about generously), but how do typefaces fit into the picture? Even more obscure, perhaps, is the word “fontanelle.” My sources suggest it comes from a similar source as the other meanings of font — i.e., a little spring. Ew. — Jim Brown.

“Font of wisdom”? OK, that got the cats snickering. When I was a kid, my mother framed a cartoon from the New Yorker and put it on the wall of the home office she shared with my father (who started this column in 1954). It showed a woman laughingly addressing her husband, a stereotypical bearded wise man in robes, saying “I still can’t get over your being a sage. You didn’t know beans when I married you.” (Interestingly, if you Google “beans sage cartoon,” you’ll find that the New Yorker is selling prints of that cartoon.)

Explaining how a baptismal “font” could possibly be related to the sort of “font” you use on your computer turns out, thankfully, to be unnecessary. There are actually two separate and completely unrelated “fonts” in English.

The typeface kind of “font” is the easier to explain. We use “font” loosely to mean a style of type (e.g., Comic Sans, the official Microsoft font), but, more precisely, a “font” is a complete set of a certain style of type, i.e., including a complete alphabet, punctuation, numerals, etc. This “font” first appeared in English in the late 16th century, based on the French “fonte,” from “fondre,” meaning “to cast” as one “casts” objects from molten metal. The first use of “font” in English was, in fact, to mean simply “cast iron.” Type at that time was, of course, cast from metal, but it wasn’t until the late 17th century that “font” (then often in the form “fount” or even “found”) was used in the “family of type” sense (“Break down the Printing-Presses, melt the Founds.” 1723).

“Font” in the other senses you mention is from a different source, the Latin “fons,” meaning “spring” or “fountain.” (“Fons” is also the ultimate source of “fountain.”) The earliest use of “font” in Old English was to mean a receptacle for water in a church used for baptism, etc. The form “fount,” which had the same source but is sometimes considered a different word, popped up in literary use in the 16th century with the meaning “spring, source” in both literal and figurative senses (“Ancient founts of inspiration well thro’ all my fancy yet.” Tennyson, 1842). This is the elusive “fount” or “font” of wisdom. As to which is correct in this sense, both are; although the poetic use of “fount” has made “fount of wisdom” more popular, “font” seems to be gaining on it in recent years.

“Fontanelle” comes directly from French, where it means literally “little fountain.” The most common uses of “fontanelle” are for the depression or hollow between two muscles or the areas of a baby’s skull that remain soft and flexible for the first year or so after birth. (The human skull is actually made up of six separate bones that fuse together over time.) The use of “fontanelle” for these spots (and the space between muscles) comes from the slight depression at such places, similar to a spring in a shallow hollow of the earth.

Please don’t play it again, Sam.

Dear Word Detective: I’ve been wondering why the noun and verb forms of “refrain” differ so much in meaning. In fact, the meanings of the noun and verb seem rather opposite, since the verb means “to avoid,” whereas the noun signifies something one sings (or states) over and over again. Could you please shed some light on this? — Tara McDaniel.

That’s a darn good question. In fact, it’s such a good question that I’m wondering why it never occurred to me to answer it before now. Maybe it actually did occur to me, perhaps while I was driving, and it just slipped my mind when I got home. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Kinda like last year’s taxes. Of course, explaining “refrain” is a lot easier than explaining why all these cats should be counted as a business expense, so that tax thing is just gonna have to wait.

My first hunch about the two meanings of “refrain” was that it was a case of an “autoantonym” or “contranym,” where one word can have two opposite (or nearly so) meanings. “Sanction,” for instance, can mean both “forbid” and “permit,” and “cleave” can mean either “stick to” or “split apart.” In some cases the two words are actually the same word (e.g., “sanction”), which has developed opposing meanings over time, but in others (e.g., “cleave”) the words have entirely separate origins and just happen to share that spelling.

Explaining how a single word like “sanction” developed two contradictory meanings can be a bit of a chore, because such transformations usually involve hundreds of years and several steps. So I’m relieved to report that in the case of “refrain,” what we’re dealing with is two separate, unconnected words whose senses are vaguely discordant, although not truly antonyms.

Oddly enough, both “refrains” first appeared in English in the 14th century. “Refrain” meaning “chorus of a song” or “a phrase frequently repeated in a poem or other writing” or “a statement, especially a complaint, that is frequently made” (“‘I’m bored’ is a frequent refrain coming from the back seat on long family car trips.”) comes directly from the Old French “refrain.” Follow “refrain” further back, and we eventually arrive at the Latin verb “refringere,” which meant “to break off.” That may seem strange for a word for things that, by definition, go on and on, but the key to a “refrain” is that it “breaks off,” i.e., stops, and then starts all over again.  Although “refrain” did arrive in English in the 14th century, the word only became truly common in the 1800s.

The other “refrain” carries the basic sense of “curb, restrain, abstain or prevent.” English adopted the word from the Old French “refraigner,” meaning “to keep in check; control,” and the root of that French word certainly bears that out. “Refraigner” came from the Latin “refrenare,” meaning “to restrict with a bridle,” as one would a horse (“re,” back, plus “frenare,” to use a bridle). So “to refrain,” etymologically, means to literally “hold your horses.”

Interestingly, the verb “to refrain” originally had both intransitive (“refrain from drinking”) and transitive (“I would like to think that the nurses’ words refrained them.” 1952) uses. But the intransitive sense meaning “to abstain from doing something” is the only use commonly heard today.