Question: What is the origin of the term "pin money"?
Answer: "Pin money," meaning "money for incidentals" or "pocket money," was at one time a term for an annual allowance provided by a man to his wife or daughter for personal expenses. In the 17th and 18th centuries, when "pin money" was a legal term, the sum was often provided for in a marriage contract, and the wife had total control over these funds.
Pin money was not necessarily an insignificant sum. One generous 16th-century father allowed his daughter the income from the lease of a parsonage to "by (buy) her pynnes." That's a lot of money for pins. If, indeed, money for actual pins was ever what was meant by the term, it must have been when pins were relatively expensive items in a budget - a woman's "pin money" could hardly have been literally equated with the cost of dressmakers' pins even in the 16th century. By that time mass manufacture of brass wire pins was already well-established in France, and pins were being imported to England by the "dossen (dozen) thousande." A proverb of the time was "a pin a day is a groat a year," with "groat" denoting a coin worth four pennies - not much money even then. Yet, at that same time, the pin money allotted the princess of Orange by her husband was allegedly 50,000 pounds a year!
So it may be missing the point altogether to connect those ordinary little pins with the term "pin money." But there were pins and there were pins: before the advent of their mass manufacture, pins were almost exclusively decorative, to be used for fastening clothing or adorning the hair. Elaborate pins made of precious metals were for the wealthy only - like the 15th-century woman "with high long pins like a gibbet" in her hair (the poor, if they had pins at all, had to settle for wooden ones). If women were spending hefty sums on these relatively tiny and seemingly superfluous objects, it's not hard to imagine that the sources of those sums, the men, might have been led to generalize all of women's seemingly incomprehensible personal expenditures as "pin money."
In this century, expensive pins as a necessity having been long forgotten, "pin money" has come to signify a small sum - pocket money or money for incidentals (a category, one supposes, into which ordinary little pins fall), usually earned, whether by a wife working for a low wage, a teenager doing odd jobs, or a writer doing an occasional review on the side. The emphasis of "pin money" is now usually less on the insignificance of the sum than on the general-purpose spending for which the money is supposedly intended. Occasionally, however, a use crops up where the meaning is clearly "a trivial sum," as in "the house sold for pin money."
Question: Can you tell me anything about the word "pamphlet"? It seems like such an ordinary word, like "booklet," except that unlike a book, there is no such thing as a "pamph."
Answer: "Pamphlet" may be a common word, but its origins in the Middle Ages are very interesting.
In the late Middle Ages, short compilations of popular classical authors were often given French diminutives based on the French form of the author's name. For example, the ancient Greek fable writer Aesop was known in French as "Esope," and his works were called by the diminutive "Esopet."
A poem titled "Pamphilus, seu De Amore" ("Pamphilus, or About Love") was written in the 12th century. Describing a series of amusing amorous adventures, it became very popular among people who could read Latin, especially among university students. Because the author was unknown, "Pam-phi-lus" in the title was made into a diminutive in French, and the poem came to be called "Pam-phi-let."
"Pamphilet" was borrowed into Anglo-Latin as "panfletus" or "pamfletus" and later entered Middle English as "pamfilet" or "pamflet," by which time it denoted not just the original poem but any short written work. The spelling "pamphlet" was first recorded in the 16th century.