1396: spanish flu and WWI Oct 7, 2018
It is only due to politics that the Spanish Flu has the name it does. There is no disagreement that the influenza outbreak of 1918 was exacerbated by the First World War, but that even had linguistic impacts. The disease is thought to have been brought over from Northern China to North America, or originated in North America by itself (although there is no real consensus) and in either case could have just remained more localized. However, both America and the British Empire had extremely strict censorship of the press, and no reports of this flu were aloud to be announced for fear that it would lower morale. Even when it had infected most of Europe, most governments censored their presses except for Spain, which was neutral. As a result of this, while the virus was spreading to all inhabited continents and killing millions, the only people that wrote about it were in Spain, so people assumed it began there.
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1395: facebook Oct 6, 2018
1394: Singular of Genitalia? Oct 5, 2018
There are plenty of words for which are plural in construction but (often) singular in usage. 'Physics' is one such word, and often so is 'bacteria' or 'data', the singular of which is 'bacterium' and 'datum respectively but people don't often bother to make the distinction. Indeed, a common pluralizing suffix in Latin was '-a' as exhibited in the above two words, but also in others such as 'genitalia' for which no singular form exists in English. The word comes from the plural of 'genitalis' but because for both men and women multiple organs act together in tandem, people will simply refer to specific organs such as the cervix or the testis if the singular is desired.
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1393: Memes are Changing English (LITW 7) Oct 4, 2018
Memes are changing the way that people speak. A formula for a common type of meme is to start with the phrase "me, when I [do such-and-such action]' followed by a picture or video illustrating the point hyperbolically. The meme in German below says just that, translating as "me, when I must go out all day acting like a [decent] person". However, in German, it begins with 'ich' which is used for subjects whereas English uses the object form 'me'. From a grammatical standpoint this makes no inherent sense, but consider that people also say "it was me" in English all the time, and do use the wrong case for the pronoun at times, but memes are certainly adding to that to the point that people have begun to speak in this way as a way to signal informality and camaraderie.
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1392: On "That's What She Said" Oct 3, 2018
Phrases like "that's what she said" are generally not thought of as particularly respectable. In part this is because it is fairly crude by nature, but it is more linguistically complex. The whole point that someone would use a double entendre is to hint at meaning without mentioning something overtly, so when the reverse happens—i.e. when meaning is drawn out where it is not intended—not only does this make obvious something that was supposed to be understood to be discrete as would happen with a purposeful double entendre, but it derailing any conversation because it consciously inverts any intended meaning.
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1391: Why Man Becomes Men Oct 2, 2018
English has a lot of features that don't maybe make immediate sense, but understanding the history can help. 'Man' pluralizing to 'men' doesn't make immediate sense, and moreover it doesn't necessarily help even to look at related strong nouns like these but looking at German can help. In German there is essentially the same vowel-shift from 'Mann' to 'Männer' (pronounced with a roughly similar vowel as in 'men'), however in German this change is a lot more consistent. Not all vowels are changed in this way, but the ones that do usually morph regularly. This is a lucky coincidence in some ways, but historically Germanic languages only indicated change in things like pluralization or tense by changing the vowels, so this would have been the norm. For more on this, see: https://youtu.be/T18K38h2ZHc
1390: history and story (and Geschichte) OCt 1, 2018
The German word 'Geschichte' is the term used to mean 'story' and 'history'. This is not a post about the possibility that people considered history as subjective necessarily—that would be for a Word Theory which you can find at patreon.com/wordfacts—but it is true also that the English word 'story' comes from a bastardization of 'history' too. This is fairly peculiar given that even 'history' is from the Romance language family, not Germanic, originating from Latin and brought to English via French; 'history'—because it is from a totally different root in French—is not related to 'Geschichte', even though the fashion term 'chic' of all things is. In this way, the two terms originate from different places, but share a sort of common history, as it were.
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1389: Voynich Manuscript Sep 30, 2018
While languages have many exception to any convention or rule, ultimately they are systematic. In the video "How Writing Began", it was discussed that despite all of the many ways writing appears, it is always going to be systematic; only 1 language on earth is known to use some sort of synergy. There is one book however, the Voynich manuscript, that is written in an unknown language that looks to use Latin letters with a few unknown ones as well. No one knows what it says or even what language it would have been from. Many people thought the person who discovered it had fabricated a book, but carbon dating proved it to be real, or at least if it were a scam, the person who discovered it wouldn't have known for sure. The tricky thing about that too is that it is systematic, with endings and other letter-combinations showing up regularly together. Some people have taken this to mean it is its own language, while others believe it is a code, but no language is completely random.
1388: Invaluable and Valuable (LITW 6) Sep 29, 2018
Contronyms certainly do exist, when a word is its own opposite, like 'inflammable', but there are also words that have negating prefixes and mean the same thing, again like 'flammable' and 'inflammable', which can—though not necessarily will—mean the same thing. A common misconception is that 'invaluable' is synonymous with 'valuable', but this is not really true. Given that 'invaluable' means that it is so indispensable as to make it impossible to put a value or price on it, it is more precious than something merely valuable. In this way, while 'inflammable' and 'flammable' can synonymous or antonymous, 'invaluable' and 'valuable' are never truly synonymous, though neither are they totally opposite.
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1387: Ground vs Grinded Sep 28, 2018
In a dictionary, it will list the forms of 'grind' including the participle 'ground' and "(rare) grinded". Some spell-checking programs will even count 'grinded' as a misspelling, but this is becoming less accurate. 'Ground is still used dominantly for most grammatical objects, but in newer usages of the word the preferred participle is 'grinded'. This tends to crop up when the subject matter is about dancing, sex, or relating to marijuana, for which any form of 'grind' is fairly new. This could be because people don't care about traditional grammar, or because they are consciously trying to distinguish the two.
1386: Strict Naming Laws Sep 27, 2018
Some countries have stricter laws concerning given names than others, and arguably, some of the strictest may be in Scandinavia. In Sweden, names have to be approved if parents wish to buck certain traditional names, or use alternative spellings. Moreover there are tens of thousands of surnames reserved for royals, and no one else is allowed to have these. These have even led people to go to court, such as when parents sued for not being allowed to spell 'Albin' as 'Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116' or later 'A', though obviously these people weren't doing this for the name, but as a protest of the rules. However, in Iceland it may be stricter, since there are only 1,700 approved names for boys and 1,800 for girls, and the surname must be a parent's first name plus '-son' or '-dottir' for sons and daughters.
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1385: 'line in Given Names Sep 26, 2018
In German, the suffix '-lein' such as in 'Fräulein' is a diminutive suffix. There are some distant relatives of this in English, but clearer traces of it can be found in given names. For instance, 'Emmeline' uses this suffix on a word that originally meant 'work', so it should be clarified that diminutive doesn't always directly translate to 'little' and does have an emotional component as well. However, not all names with '-line' come from this. 'Caroline', which is the French diminutive of 'Charles' has a similar—though not identical suffix—but Madeline (spelt many different ways) comes from '(Mary) Magdalene', such that what looks like a suffix is built into the name, as is likewise the case for 'Evangeline'.
1384: The Family of 'As' Sep 25, 2018
As mentioned the other day, 'like' as a preposition or a conjunction is a bit of a Germanic anomaly, but in some ways so is 'as'. While 'like' is pretty much on its own in terms of linguistic relatives, 'as' is related to the Dutch and German 'als', however, the context in which all three are used is very different for the most part. In German, 'als' can mean 'as', but would normally translate as 'than', and would be able to introduce comparative relative clauses in a way that 'as' usually does not, and in Dutch it functions mostly the same as German, though not completely. In this case—as would probably be imagined—German is more traditionally Germanic than English, as 'as' relates to 'also' and used to be able to introduce more clauses than it can now, or if you will, "it introduced more clauses as [it is able to] now". Moreover, 'similar' also has a shared root to 'as' and is where the Danish 'som' of the same meaning comes from.
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1383: arm and army Sep 24, 2018
There's a pretty obvious link between the English 'arm' and the word 'army', but in German, French, and Russian—all belonging to different language families—the words are also very similar to the English. The words 'armee', 'armée' and 'армия (armiya)' respectively are clearly related to the English word 'army', but only German has a word that is also related to the body part 'arm' ("Der Arm"). This might seem to suggest that French and Russian—if not other Romantic or Slavic languages—borrowed their word from some Germanic language, but 'army' in this case comes from Latin, where it originated from 'arma' which meant 'tools' but lead to the verb 'armare' meaning 'to arm'. It is only a coincidence that French and Russian took other words for 'arm' and did not use the same Info-European root. Coincidentally, 'armoire' and 'amber' also come from this root, but took a different interpretation of 'tool'.
1382: Like as a Conjunction Sep 23, 2018
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1381: -ious: A Suffix with 2 Origins Sep 22, 2018
1380: Why Sumerians Rotated their Script Sep 21, 2018
Writing developed independently in three places independently: Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica, and China, but only alphabets developed from the Sumerians. This process of continuous abstraction from images was described in the Word Facts Video released today, but part of the reason that the symbols look more abstracted was because they were turned 90º. The reason for this was that it was originally written up-to-down, but to avoid smudging the clay, it was shifted right-to-left. However, while the scribes found this easier, those who had learned to read up-to-down struggled with this, and so the scribes simply wrote the letters sideways, to that both parties could work more efficiently.
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1379: 420 Sep 20, 2018
It is sometimes difficult to find accurate etymologies of new words and in particular slang terms; part of this is due to the fact that they are likely less studied by chance, but also many people will make up their own origins. Though not a word in the traditional sense, 420 is something for which people have ascribed many false origins, including that it related to a the police code for smoking marijuana, or that it was the number of strains etc.. The reason for the former and most prevalent faux-theory is that those who originated the term spread fliers through a few cities in Southern California as a way to get in touch with people to meet up and smoke gave that as the reasoning, but it goes back much further. In the early 1970's a group of high-schoolers would smoke after school at 4:20pm, and would use that term as a code to not get in trouble around other people.
1378: Business' Names Sep 19, 2018
Following off of yesterday's post, the principles that apply to the creation of new words also apply to companies. Traditionally, businesses were named after owners, or just say the name of the product with the name of the towns it was from, or another defining feature. When these stopped being so localized, the tendency was to shorten, either by abbreviating or initializing, or changing the name to something catchier, as to be more distinctive. As business shifted over to the internet and to apps, not only could fewer names be used, but shorter names that were easier to type were highly sought after to attract the most customers. Due in part to the scarcity of short names, and also to try to sound edgy, many startups would use variant spellings of ordinary words like Lyft™ from 'lift', or would simply make up words that were easy to remember. Context is significant in the history of names.