2739: What’s the Story with Story? Jun 20, 2024

The word ‘story’ is mostly used to describe some telling of a tale, but it is also used to describe the level of a building, sometimes spelt ‘storey’ in this sense. The use as “personal account” is fairly easy to understand, from the same root as ‘history’, though the meaning has somewhat flipped from the Greek ῐ̔στορέω (historéō) meaning “to inquire/ to ask”, and likewise the noun ἱστορίᾱ (historíā) that became “history” meant, “learning through research”. Like ‘philosophy’, it once had a far more general meaning, but here it began to refer to the description of research as opposed to simply the research by itself. 

When it comes to the story of a building, this is less clear.  This may have had something to do with art depicted in friezes and murals, or as historical objects displayed behind glass panels. From this, it became associated with a set of windows and eventually a level of a house, measured in windows. While it may be tempting to ascribe this to the French ‘estorer’ (to build), the sense of ‘story’ (or really ‘historia’) as building level predates this French word’s introduction to English.

2738: Ultraviolet and Ultramarine Jun 19, 2024

Ultraviolet, though not a color in the traditional sense, is named for being “beyond violet” on the color spectrum, though there are other colors colloquially named with ‘ultra-’. Meanwhile, ‘ultramarine’ is a form of blue, though not exactly a shade or hue, that you might think might mean ‘intensely sea-blue’. First of all, that meaning of ‘ultra-’ is fairly modern, but more to the point it was named for the material lapis lazuli, also known as ‘azure’ from the same root. It was procured primarily from Central Asia, so to Europeans it was “(azzurro) oltramarino”, or translated from Italian “(azure) from overseas”. The name stuck around and now applies to a particular hue, “ultramarine blue”, now virtually never made from the stone.

2737: Paper: How Papyrus has Changed Jun 18, 2024

Although papyrus writing is all but unheard of today, the legacy still lives on in the word ‘paper’. More accurately, it was not a later revival after the use of wood pulp in papermaking, but a continuously used term. In fact, the word ‘papyrus’ as it refers to the material as opposed to merely the plant was a later invention in English based off the original Greek, in the 18th century. While there have been other materials in use, notably parchment and linen, the generic use of paper can still be seen in ‘paper money’, which has never been made from wood pulp. This is an example of semantic narrowing, where a word’s meaning begins to exclude connotations it once had, where ‘paper’ has become a material, rather than any writing surface.

2736: Port and Starboard Jun 17, 2024

On a ship, “port and starboard” refer to the left and right, relative to the direction the boat is facing. While it is clear why these terms are more useful than “left and right” as people move around the ship, it would not immediately be clear why in particular. ‘Starboard’ has been modified somewhat since Old English stēorbord (i.e. “steer board”), but this is the side old rutters emerged from the water on, to make it easier for majority right-handed steerers. Port is named from the ancient convention of boarding on this side of the ship, since a dock would need to pick one, and this became the norm everywhere, with this convention carrying over into modern passenger aircraft, so have a look next time you’re at the airport.

2735: Crocodile Spelling Reform Jun 16, 2024

Spelling and pronunciation are often brought into English from Latin, though of course this historical, multilingual game of telephone brought along with it many bugs. 'Crocodile' was for a long time rendered as 'cocodrile', an error made in later forms of Latin that transferred into French and adopted into English. It was brought back to 'crocodile' based off of the Greek κροκόδειλος (krokó-deilos), itself meaning 'rock + worm'. In Ancient Indo-European languages there is a clear relation between rocks and sitting reptiles, perhaps because of their tendency to sit on rocks. This etymology would not be immediately evident to the average Middle English speaker, nor modern for that matter, but in the later years of the renaissance there was a concerted effort to bring English spelling in line with that of Latin and Greek, and at least in this case it managed to affect the pronunciation, compared with other words like ‘salmon’ where the L was added but the pronunciation never differed.

2734: Regnal Names Jun 15, 2024

Around Europe, there is a tradition of monarchs changing their names when ascending the throne, known as regnal names. This practice is certainly on the decline among European royalty, but is still in practice in Papal names, including the modern Catholic Pope Francis, born Jorge Mario, and no pope has kept his birth name since the 16th century. This practice began with Pope John II, born Mercurius, and he didn’t want to be named for a Roman, pagan, deity as pope, though this did happen with all six popes, Martin (including Martinus and Marinus). 

In regnal names, though now less common among European royalty in the last century, it was never only a European practice, being seen across Africa, East Asia, and the ancient Near East. The reasons vary, including cultures of naming taboos, implied association or dissociation with previous rulers, or simply to mark the beginning of a reign, this practice has been uniquely adopted all over the world.

2733: A Double-Minced Oath Jun 15, 2024

Though not so popular these days, the phrase “what in tarnation” is one of many minced oaths, or in other words, a replacement for a more serious or potentially blasphemous term, along with ‘gosh’, ‘gadzooks’, and sort of “gordon bennett”. The difference here is that ‘tarnation’ is a mince of ‘darnation’, which is already a mince of ‘damnation’. The difference here is that first of all, darnation was never a very popular word compared to simply ‘darn’, and was reinforced by the word ‘tarnal’, a modification of the word ‘eternal’ that had some popularity in the 19th century. Now the phrase is pretty much limited to humorous usage, and is certainly associated with the old American West.

2732: How Society Has Come to View Generations Jun 13, 2024

The “Lost Generation” preceded the “Silent Generation”, but what generation preceded them? The answer is that there are no generational names earlier than this because it is a very new practice of breaking up and naming generations is really very new. Naturally, there had been plenty of momentous events throughout history that shaped society in sudden ways, but it was only after WWI that the collective experience of everyone born in a narrow set of years was classed as a generation. Before this, ‘generation’ only denoted the lines in a particular family.

Sometimes these social-generations will be based on an event, such as those above and the post-WWII baby boom (hence boomers) but increasingly the naming of generations is not ex post facto, but anticipated every fifteen years or so. 

In recent decades a flurry of names are selected for each generation until one sticks. After “baby boomers” named for the postwar baby boom came the “baby busters”—denoting the subsequent drop in fertility—until this was replaced with “Gen X”. That particular name came from the use of X as an undefined variable like in algebra, supposedly denoting the counterculture’s anti-definition approach, but was taken to be alphabetical. It was then applied to “Gen Y” (eventually replaced by “millennial”) and “Gen Z”, which was also early on called “iGeneration” but that didn’t stick nor did the i-names in technology, really.

Following this people have come up with “Generation α” (i.e. ‘alpha’), still supposing the earlier Gen X was alphabetical and now restarting with a new alphabet. It has really only been from the mid-1960’s then that social generations became taken as a matter of course, as opposed to the earlier albeit relatively novel event-based delineations.

2731: Sprite (Soda) Jun 12, 2024

 Coca-Cola has in its 137 years of operation acquired many brands, but it’s also started many. Fanta was famously created when wartime Germany was unable to import the cola syrup and is named for the German ‘Fantasie’ (imagination), but even the Sprite drink also has older origins than its initial 1961 launch. Nearly two decades before that, Coca-Cola’s mascot was Sprite Boy, who was a traditional sprite in the mythological sense, used for an ad campaign promoting the nickname “coke”, phased out in 1951. When they launched a new soda type to compete with 7-Up, they reused the name, but not the image, of this older mascot, likely harkening back to that, and perhaps sprites’ other connotation with high energy, hence ‘spritely’.

2730: Aramaic Has Multiple Ways of Saying “There is [/not]” Jun 11, 2024

Hebrew does not have a verb meaning ‘to have’ like many other languages, so rather it uses a verb meaning “there is” (יש yesh) or “there isn’t” (אין ein), plus a dative to express possession, so אין לנו (ein lanu) literally “there is not to us” means “we don’t have”. Of course, these words can also just refer to existence, like in אין מקום (ein makom) “there is no room”, not just possession.

This duality is further complicated in Aramaic, the closest related language to Hebrew, with the forms אית (it) and איכא (ika) both meaning “there is” while לית (leit) and ליכא (leika) each mean “there isn’t”. While this might look more linguistically diverse, it’s not exactly the case, since אית (it) is the basis for all of those words. איכא (ika), the other positive word, comes from a combination אית כא (it ka) for “it is here; it is so”. The negative words are also compounds likewise with לית (leit) coming from  לא אית (lo it) with לא meaning “no; not” (i.e. “there is not”) , and the other negative form, ליכא (leika), also combining with כא (“here; thus”) to make “there is not”. While Aramaic has two forms for these positive and negative particles, instead of Hebrew’s one each, there is not a particular meaningful difference.

2729: The Real Panda Jun 10, 2024

The word ‘panda’ originally comes from a Nepalese word, which is interesting on its own since the historical range of pandas ends well south of Nepal. This is because the original term ‘panda’ did not denote the giant panda, but rather the totally unrelated red panda. The term has also been applied historically to the bearcat, similarly to the Chinese 大貓熊 (dàmāoxióng) “giant bear cat” or just 熊貓 (xióngmāo) “bear cat”. This is why the term is “giant panda”—giant compared to a red panda—but most people will simply say “panda”, assuming the red panda was named later, when it was described using the term ‘panda’ some four decades earlier.

2728: (Un)Holy Alliance Jun 9, 2024

The phrase “unholy alliance” may seem like it would be a combination of unholy + alliance, but really it is un- + holy alliance. The term Holy Alliance specifically refers to the somewhat informal alliance between Russia, Prussia, and Austria during the negotiations following Napoleon's defeat. Though their goal was to promote a Christian approach to statecraft as a counter to France’s rationalist, enlightenment ideology that spread across Europe, though of course Prussia was Protestant, Austria, Catholic, and Russia, Eastern Orthodox.

This resulted in the Unholy Alliance of Western European nations along with the Muslim, Ottoman Empire, particularly against Russian interests. This phrase had already been generalized to mean “an alliance of powers for negative purposes and/or whose interests usually misalign” by the start of the 20th century, which does essentially view the phrase as unholy + alliance, and its uses now go outside the realm of politics solely. Meanwhile the term “holy alliance” is not used at all outside of its early 19th century context.

2727: ‘Hebrew’ and Why ע is Difficult to Transcribe Jun 8, 2024

The letter ayin ע in Hebrew is one that has led to a multitude of difficult transliterations, into Greek, Latin, and English that don’t have this sound traditionally. Historically the ע represented the voiced pharyngeal fricative ([ʕ]), as it still does in some traditional dialects, but in Modern Hebrew has become silent. It is usually ignored in transliterations therefore, as in the Biblical city of Ai (עַי) but there are a few notable exceptions. The word ‘Hebrew’ (language) is עברית (ivrit) but since the word starts with an ע ayin, it was transliterated into Latin with an H. Meanwhile, in the Biblical cities of Gomorrah and Gaza, these also start with an ayin but due to the pharyngealization were transliterated with a G, or in truth a Greek letter Γ gamma. In Arabic, these are written with a separate letter gayin غ‎ representing the sounds /ɣ/ also written with a G when transliterating Bagdad or /ʁ/. This letter is is unique to Arabic among other Semitic writing systems, but it’s unlikely that ayin ע used to represent both pharyngeal fricative and velar fricatives, since this was accomplished with the letter gimmel ג (not גּ). 

For clearer pronunciations, watch this post in video-form.

2726: Housecats and Stoves Jun 7, 202

The normal word in German for an indoor cat is a ‘’Hauskatze”  (i.e. housecat) but a slightly cute way of saying it is “Stubentiger” or hyper-literally broken down as “stove tiger”. The tiger part of that is understandable enough if clearly tongue-in-cheek, but the stove is curious. Looking at the English word ‘stove’, it is first referred to a heated room, like a sauna or bathhouse, and then later denoted the source of the heat, but still more in the sense of a furnace. Only later with the technological innovations leading to the modern stovetop did it take its modern sense, and the word ‘stew’ derived from a similar path.

Meanwhile, in German, this same root also changed slightly, denoting a living room where presumably the main source of heating in the home was located. This has led to a more generic sense of hominess as seen in “Stubentiger”, though “Stube” for a living room is not typically used anymore outside of some regional dialects, and Wohnzimmer (literally “living + room”) is preferred. 

2725: Saying ‘Either’: Either Way is Acceptable Jun 6, 2024

‘Either’ has two pronunciations: /ˈiːðə(ɹ)/, i.e. EE-sound, or /ˈaɪ.ðə(ɹ)/, i.e. AY-sound. Of course, technically it has even more possible pronunciations than merely those two, but only in the normal way that different accents articulate one sound or another distinctly. Here, the fact that the initial vowel can be produced differently by the same person ad hoc, without raising eyebrows in basically any dialect, is remarkable.

It would seem now in both the US and the north of the UK prefer with /iː/, while in the South of the UK and some small pockets in America /ˈaɪ/ is preferred, which is also probably more traditional, though historically, a third option /eɪ/ (i.e. rhymes with ‘way’) was also used and would likely have been closer to the Old English origins. 

All of this above applies to the negative version, ‘neither’.

2724: No Toe? Jun 5, 2024

It might seem natural to have separate words for fingers and toes, but this is not so common everywhere. In fact, through Europe and Western Asia, it is pretty neatly divided that Uralic languages (i.e. Finnish, Estonian, & Hungarian) and Germanic languages have words for toes, except for Yiddish where the term is פינגער פונ פוס (finger fun fus) meaning “finger of the foot”. That means that other Indo-European languages like the Romance and Slavic branches, as well as Semitic and Turkic languages etc. basically use a word that would be better translated as ‘digit’. 

Looking around the globe as well, the trend roughly continues in Asia etc. where having a distinct word for ‘toe’ is not a given and does not appear in many of the languages of Southeast Asia like Thai and Indonesian, but is present in ones located further north.

2723: The Pronunciation of ‘Often’ Jun 4, 2024

‘Often’ is one word, with 3 forms, sort of. Plenty of words are pronounced different ways by different people, though usually it identifies a dialect or sociolect. Here it identifies an interesting pattern, not tied to any particular group of people. Originally, the word was just ‘oft’, and still appears this way sometimes, especially in combination (e.g. ‘an oft-cited source’). This then joined the ranks of other -ten verbs where the -T- is not pronounced, like ‘listen’, ‘soften’, ‘fasten’, ‘christen’ and ‘moisten’, of which all have the T pronounced without the ‘-en’ ending except ‘list’ which isn’t used anymore outside of the now-dated ‘listful’.  

Back to ‘often’, which may be the only one where pronouncing with or without the /t/ would be acceptable. This is because the more historically common way to say it was with the /t/, and it is only more recently that it is articulated like ‘soften’ which is now favored in formal settings, but given how recent that is, the version without a /t/ sound is still prevalent. 

There will be more on this—and why those T’s became silent—tomorrow.

2722: Salads and Salt Jun 3, 2024

Looking for a low-sodium food item? Try a salad, derived from the Latin for ‘salt’, ‘saltum’. This is because the Roman (herba) salata would be in a salt brine, more like kimchi than a typical garden salad, or for that matter Caesar salad. 

Of course, even now, the default ‘salad’ in the modern mind may involve some kind of base with a leafy green, the word extends to plenty of completely unrelated salads, like ‘bulgur salad’ or pasta salad, which are mostly wheat, and tuna-, chicken-, and potato salads are majority comprised of what their names suggest. This begs the question then why ‘salad’, unmodified, is thought of as green? 

Salad, as a distinct dish, really seems to have solidified in 16th century Western Europe into the modern definitions and connotations. The notion of salad being green and fresh can be seen in the phrase “salad days” i.e. one’s youth, first recorded in Shakespeare’s 1606 "Antony and Cleopatra", reflecting the practice of using fresh vegetables as opposed to the salted, pickled ones, which ironically the real Mark Antony and Cleopatra would not have called a salad.  

2721: How Spanish Created Its Own Pronoun Jun 2, 2024

There are parts of speech, known in linguistics as open lexical classes, where new words emerge constantly, like verbs and nouns, while closed lexical classes, like articles, prepositions, and pronouns, hardly ever change and are rarely if ever expanded. Spanish however invented a new pronoun [by pronoun standards] in the 17th century, ‘usted, ustedes’, from the phrase “vuestra merced” literally “your mercy” but functionally “your grace”, and like English’s “your grace” or “your majesty” etc. this is practically a second person pronoun, but grammatically acts like a third person pronoun. There are not direct parallels in other romance languages given the novelty of ‘usted’, but Portugese does have ‘você’ on the same basis, ‘vossemecê’ (your mercy), but this is rarely used, replaced in most situations by ‘o senhor’.

2720: UK / US Doublet Herb Names Jun 1, 2024

In the UK, ‘coriander’ refers to the ground up seeds (as it does in the US) as well as the leaves of the herb, while in the US, the relatively contentious spice ‘cilantro’ may be thought of as a flavor prominent in Latin cuisine, it is also simply latin. Both of these words come from the same origin, the Latin ‘coriandrum’ which was borrowed into English and then effectively borrowed again from Spanish with ‘cilantro’. This is not to be confused with ‘culantro’ which also comes from the same etymological root but it is a plant native to Central America. 

The same process occurs with British ‘rocket’, ultimately from the Latin ‘eruca’ is known in the US as ‘arugula’, also from ‘eruca’, though in this case introduced by Italian immigrants to America and widely adopted by the 1970’s to the point that ‘rocket’ for the name of the leaf is virtually unrecognized. The difference here compared with ‘coriander’ is that ‘rocket’ was heavily influenced by French, making it look more different to the original Latin.