Language Of Confusion: Maximum Carnage, Part II

We’re back at looking the Proto Indo European root sker-, to cut, and all the crazy words descended from it.
 
First, curt showed up in the mid fourteenth century (where it was actually spelled court), from the classical Latin curtus, short. You cut something short, you’re curt. Straight to the point on this one, isn’t it? Curtail is actually from the same place, though it showed up later, in the late fifteenth century. It actually has a slightly different history, coming from the Old French courtault, which is of course from curtus.
 
But that’s not nearly weird enough. Now, a currier—not a courier, which delivers things—is a person who dresses or dyes leather. It showed up in the mid fourteenth century from the Old French corier, from the classical Latin coriarius, leather worker, from corium, leather. Now why did I explain this obscure word you’ve probably never heard outside of a last name? It’s actually related to the word cuirass. That word showed up in the mid fifteenth century from the Latin phrase coriacea vestis, leather clothes, and that’s also from corium. Cuirasses, as in the armor, started out being made of leather, which is cut flesh, so now we have two words we hardly ever use these days.
 
And we can get weirder! The word crone, like an old lady, is from sker-. It showed up in the late fourteenth century, from the Anglo French carogne, which meant carrion or a carcass. So yeah. Not exactly a flattering term for an old woman. It’s from the Vulgar Latin caronia, which means carrion. Because they were insulting old women by calling them dead bodies, we have crone.
 
Finally today, there’s cortex—and all the words related to that, like cortical or corticoid. It showed up in the mid seventeenth century, meaning outer shell or husk in botany, not being used in relation to human anatomy, specifically the brain, until 1741. It’s from the classical Latin cortex, which means tree bark—the outer shell of the tree. Not really sure how the outer shell of something evolved from sker-, but it did.
 
Sources
Online Etymology Dictionary
Google Translate
Omniglot
Dictionary.com
University of Texas at Austin Linguistic Research Center
University of Texas at San Antonio’s page on Proto Indo European language
Fordham University