Today’s podictionary word brought to you by GoToMeeting. Try it free for 30 days by following the link www.gotomeeting.com/podcast When I peer into the dictionaries they tell me that the word nefarious means “wicked” and “unlawful.” This may be true but it seems to me that nefarious is sometimes used in a lighter tone. I said to someone the other day that Google could use all the data that they are constantly gathering for nefarious purposes. By that I didn’t mean I expected Google to become some master criminal corporation, but rather that they could use it in sneaky ways that were to their advantage. The word nefarious appeared in English in writing 12 years before William Shakespeare died.  The work that nefarious appeared in is reputed to be the first monolingually English dictionary, written by a guy named Robert Cawdrey. The word came from Latin and back in Latin had been one of those words that got squished together from two other words.  Both of those words trace back to Indo-European roots. Ne is simple enough and it means “not.”  The Latin fas meant “according to divine law” so that nefas meant “against divine law.” The Indo-European parent of fas meant “to set” so that the divine law would have been seen as set and fixed. That Robert Cawdrey guy was an appropriate fellow to bring nefarious to English since he seemed to go against divine law himself to some extent. First let me tell you about his dictionary.  The title alone is quite something: A table alphabeticall, conteyning and teaching the true writing, and understanding of hard usuall English wordes, borrowed from the Hebrew, Greek, Latine, or French etc with the interpretation thereof by plaine English words, gathered for the benefit & helpe of ladies, gentlewomen, or any other unskilfull persons, whereby they may the more easilie and better understand many hard English wordes, which they shall heare or read in scriptures, sermons, or elsewhere, and also be made able to use the same aptly themselves So at one stroke Cawdrey labels half the human population as unskillful. That’s not why he was nefarious though. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography tells me that this Table Alphabetical was largely copied from other people’s work, though that wasn’t nefarious either since it was totally legal in those days.  Today we’d call it repurposing because the earlier works were intended to be used translating between languages such as Latin and English. The Table Alphabetical was the first dictionary of words in English, defined in English. What was nefarious about Robert Cawdrey is that he stood up to the church. He’d been a deacon and a priest but his thinking ran counter to his peers and he was charged, tried and booted out of the church before ever his dictionary came to print. His crime? He wouldn’t read certain official church missives from the pulpit. He felt that a Christian was a Christian and the church fathers were acting as if they were more Christian than other people. I guess they did feel that he was less Christian. Less