2787: Blue Dog Democrat Aug 7, 2024

The term "Blue Dog Democrat" would easily evoke the Democratic Party's modern association with the color blue, especially in light of spin-off terms like “Red Dog Republicans” etc., but it's worth noting that the association of blue with the Democratic Party and red with the Republican Party didn't become standardized until the 2000 presidential election. Before that, media outlets often switched the colors depending on the election cycle. 

The term "Blue Dog Democrat" refers to more conservative Democrats who sought to distance themselves from the party's liberal wing, but why "blue dog"?

In the early 1990s, these moderate Democrats often met in the office of Texas Representative Pete Geren. Geren's office was adorned with a peculiar painting by Louisiana artist George Rodrigue, featuring a blue dog—a recurring motif in Rodrigue's work. This particular painting, with its distinctive and surreal blue dog, became an unlikely mascot for the group.

As these moderate Democrats worked to carve out a centrist space in American politics, they began to refer to themselves informally as "Blue Dog Democrats," drawing inspiration from the blue dog painting that had overseen many of their meetings, predating the overall association between the Democratic Party and blue. 

2786: Pepperoni Aug 6, 2024

Much like many of America's immigrant food traditions, pepperoni pizza only bares slight resemblance to any original sausage, or for that matter any pizza, that would be found in Italy. There are many pieces of evidence that pepperoni is not authentically Italian, including its ingredients and that it is not made with a natural casing, the clearest signal is that the word ‘pepperoni’ means nothing in Italian; although ‘peperone’ (with a different spelling) does mean ‘bell pepper’ in Italian, it is not made with bell pepper. 

2785: Console Aug 5, 2024

While video games may give emotional comfort to some, a gaming console does not really have anything to do with consolation in the typical, emotional sense. However, rather than one being a modern divergence, both of these senses are divergences from the original.

A console is a tool from architecture, a type of bracket used to support a structure above, typically seen below balconies for example. Later, this was applied to other things, such as support underneath a wall-mounted table, like a kitchen counter for example. Eventually, in the 19th century other operational systems also stored away began to be referred to, such as an organ console and eventually electronic consoles in the 20th century, both denoting the control system. Now ‘gaming console’ does not really denote anything that’s hidden or structural.

The emotional sense developed similarly, and significantly earlier, in the sense that ‘support’ too can be physical or of emotional comfort.

2784: Bugs Bug Engineers August 4, 2024

The popular tale of the term ‘bug’ in the context of technical glitches often centers around an incident involving early machine encountering problems caused by an actual insect. One involved a story of a bug getting caught in some factory machine, and another version of this tale involves computing pioneer Grace Hopper, who, according to legend, in 1947, found a moth trapped in a relay of the Harvard Mark II, causing an error. Neither of these are true, and moreover the team at harvard even noted the incident in their logbook as the "first actual case of bug being found", implying that the term was already in popular.

In reality, the term "bug" has been used to describe mechanical malfunctions since at least the 19th century. Engineers and inventors, including Thomas Edison, referred to unexpected flaws or problems in their inventions as ‘bugs’. This usage probably stems from the general meaning of ‘bug’ as an unseen, troublesome creature or nuisance. Although a software bug is now the more common word, especially given how much more bug-prone code can be than traditional 19th century mechanics, its origins were not so serendipitous as the stories

2783: How ‘Handle’ and ‘Fifth’ Became Metric Aug 3, 2024

There are certain measurements in imperial or US customary units that are only used in specific contexts, like knots (1 nautical mile per hour), while some others are only used in certain contexts by habit. A ‘fifth’ is a common measurement for alcoholic drinks, its name coming from being a ⅕ of a gallon, and likewise a ‘handle’ is ½ a gallon or in other words 2 quarts. These are now officially defined, even in the US that does not use the metric system, as 750mL (instead of ~757mL) and 1.75L respectively. This makes a fifth and a handle metric terms, even though they are not SI units.

2782: Sugar: (Why the SH)? Aug 2, 2024

The pronunciation of ‘sugar’ with an initial [ʃ] "sh" sound and a [g] as opposed to [k] sound common in most other languages is a result of internal shifts. In English, the pronunciation deviated from its spelling due to the Great Vowel Shift and other phonological changes during the Middle English period. Unlike French, where "sucre" maintained its straightforward phonetic structure, English underwent shifts where certain "s" sounds followed by a "u" began to be pronounced as [ʃ] "sh," a process seen in other words like ‘sure’ and ‘pressure’. Moreover, while most languages take their words for sugar from Arabic, there was an earlier form that Arabic borrowed from Persian ‘shakar’, so while there would be precedent, this is not relevant.

The [g], as opposed to [k] sound is to do with stress. That is to say, when a syllable is unstressed and at the end of a word, it is the least likely to be in what linguists would call the “area of accuracy” and since the R is voiced (i.e. engages the vocal cords), the [k] also becomes voiced as [g].

2781: Red and Black Seas: Color and Cardinal Direction Aug 1, 2024

Historically, and found in many disparate cultures around the globe, there have been associations between cardinal directions, and colors, namely

Red = South

Black = North

White = West

Green/Blue = East

Yellow = Center

This is not to say that people would say “you need to travel red for 10 miles” but rather it shows up in a plethora of place names. For instance, both the names of the Red Sea and the Black Sea come from the perspective of the Greek and those in the Near East, along with the White Sea in Wester Russia. Belarus literally means ‘white Russia’ with there historically having been others including ‘black Russia’ referring to the Baltic states to the north. 

The Mongol hordes were named for colors relative to where they were: Blue, White, and of course the Golden Horde.

Of course, this is not always so cut-and-dry. In China, there is the Yellow River that flows eastward into the Yellow Sea was the most vital, central waterway of early China, but whether this is related to this historic tradition, or whether this is a reference to the water’s murkiness—or possibly some combination—would be hard to prove on its own.

2780: Jack and Gill: of Liquid Jul 31, 2024

In SI units, there are certain standards by which measurements’ names are converted or not, so 100 grams technically converts to 1 hectogram, but you will never see this, and you would be more likely to hear 100,000 milligrams or 0.1 kilograms. This is also officially done in US customary units and unofficially in the imperial system.

For instance, ½ a cup* is almost always denoted as such, but may be referred to as a gill, particularly in measuring liquids like alcoholic drinks especially. Despite its orthographic similarity to ‘gill’ as in “of a fish”, it is pronounced /d͡ʒɪl/, extra proof of which is that ½ of a gill is a jack. You might assume that this was formed as a pun based on the nursery rhyme, but it was the other way around; the poetic words are in reference to King Charles I lowering the volume of a jack in 1625 in order to collect more on taxes, which then by definition made gill smaller, or in other words come tumbling after. The earliest, 17th century versions of the rhyme indeed use the spelling of ‘Gill’ and not ‘Jill’ as most would write it today.

*Very technically, a gill is ¼ of a pint, as pints are the basis of the system, but this is equal to ½ a cup.

2779: Old English Sound Shift A to O Jul 30, 2024

Before the Great Vowel Shift in the early days of Modern English, there were many smaller sound shifts. The transition from [ɑ] / [æ] to [o] in Old English is one such example, that is less linear than it would at first glance appear. 

One of the key processes that led to the change from [ɑ] to [o] was breaking and diphthongization. In other words, a single vowel sound, here [ɑ], into a complex vowel sound. Eventually however, the reverse occurred and the breaking (diphthongs) merged into one vowel, but it was then realized as [o]. For instance, how this looked:

Haldan (to hold) became healdan, and later holdan. Other -old words, including gold, bold, fold, cold, and indeed old developed the exact same way from Old English.

The Old English word ‘cælf’ (calf) also underwent breaking to become "cealf," and eventually "calf" in Modern English. The way it reverted back is not relevant to this process, and was affected by a later shift. 

As was hinted at, the sound shift was not total—or else there would be no words with [ɑ] / [æ]—but occurred within particular linguistic environments, i.e. the surrounding consonants would influence [ɑ] / [æ] to break or not, such as before /ld/. 

2778: Sweat Like a Pig Jul 29, 2024

Pigs, famously, do not sweat, which is why they have to roll in mud in order to cool themselves down; water is a far better conductor of heat than air. So out of all animals, how did the phrase “to sweat like a pig” develop? Some phrases are hard to pin down, because some of the phrase was lost, and now it sounds strange out of context, such as, “happy as a clam [at high tide]”, or sometimes the connotations of those words change, as in, “kick the bucket”. In this case, it is closer to the latter reason.

This name comes not from pigs the animals, but from pig-iron, a name for an intermediate stage of iron in the iron smelting process. Pig-iron, which is crude iron cast into ingots, got its name from the fact that lots of ingots would be poured at once from a central channel, respectively referred to the piglets and sows. 

Once the iron is cooling, as with any cast iron, water droplets form around the metal like sweat. In lots of cases, metal is referred to as sweating, not just with iron but also steel and copper etc., even though much like real pigs, pig-irons don’t sweat either.

2777: Tsar and Czar (or Tzar) Jul 28, 2024

Some languages have official systems for transliteration, like Chinese to English, though these systems have been updated multiple times in history. However, for many common languages written in other writing systems, transliteration is often inconsistent. While Russian transliterations are usually pretty standard, Russian contains many sounds not found in English, and some letters do not correspond directly between the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. This is reflected in the choice of Tsar or Czar (or the much rarer Tzar), since the letter Ц (tse) is pronounced somewhere between /ts/ and /tz/, though historically, and in some other Cyrillic-written languages it closer to /ṣ/. Since the word ‘czar’ is derived from ‘Caesar’, some choose to maintain that in the spelling.

This also seems to be contextual, which, as we’ll see, has ramifications today. For instance, “Czar Nicholas” was the most popular form in the 18th and 19th centuries until a few years after the Romanovs were deposed. At that point, “Tsar Nicholas” became the preferred spelling by a wide margin, starting in 1923. A similar trend occurred with Czar Boris / Tsar Boris, where the former was more popular until 1904, after which the latter became dominant. This change predates the reign of Boris III of Bulgaria, who assumed the throne in 1919 where a change might have been expected.

You might think modern uses would follow this trend, but recently in the news, the phrase "Border Czar" referring to Vice President Kamala Harris has predominantly followed the traditional spelling with a 'C'. This is not an isolated case; modern political taskmasters or policy leaders are often spelled with ‘czar’, including the Drug Czar appointed by the US Senate in 1982, and titles like "terrorism czar" or "cybersecurity czar" consistently use CZ-. While these forms have historically been interchangeable, we may eventually see ‘Tsar’ distinguished as the Eastern European leader and ‘czar’ as a political appointee for specific tasks.

2776: Bruxelles: Why an X? Jul 27, 2024

The spelling of "Bruxelles," the French name for the capital of Belgium, with an 'x' instead of a 'ss' as used in Dutch, and as result, English, stands out, especially since French typically doesn't use 'x' in this context. The name ‘Bruxelles’ originates from the Old Dutch ‘Broekzele’ meaning "settlement in the marsh." Over time, as the region became more influenced by French, the name adapted to fit French phonetics and orthographic norms, except in this case it was not per se to fit French as we know it now, where it is usually pronounced like /s/ in the city’s name.

During the Middle Ages, Latin was the lingua franca of educated and administrative classes in Europe. Latin texts often used 'x' to denote the sound /ks/, a practice that influenced many Romance languages. This influence is visible in the spelling of place names as Latin transitioned into Old French. The '-zele' part of the word Old Dutch name likely shifted to '-xelles' under the influence of Latin orthography, where the 'x' was used to represent a combination of sounds that was easier for Latin speakers to write and recognize without assuming a glottal stop. It used to be pronounced [bʁyksɛl] in French more commonly, but now it is not so common.

2775: The Pirate(d) Accent Jul 26, 2024

The classic pirate accent is not only characterized by its distinctive Arrr!. While there are some other lexical additions, like the use of ‘ye’ rather than ‘you [all]’ even sometimes in the singular, the word ‘matey’ (e.g. “avast, ye matey” [sic]) or ‘hearties’, it also features a number of other regular phonetic and syntactic rules typical of a normal dialect. In actual fact, it basically is a normal dialect, as a somewhat cheap or at least unknowing interpretation of the West Country accent. 

The pirate accent came to be after the 1950 Disney film "Treasure Island", featuring the actor Robert Newton in the role of Long John Silver. Robert Newton hailed from Dorset, part of England's West Country. This region's accent has certain features that lend themselves to the exaggerated, rugged, and not high-society sound that lent itself well for use in the film, and he used his normal accent.

The West Country accent includes rolled R's, ‘me’ instead of ‘my’, as well as the word ‘be’ in place of ‘am’ / ‘is’, and historically ‘bist’ instead of ‘are’ (2nd p.s.) but this is not a feature of the pirate accent. Other similarities include /aɪ/ (vowel in ‘time’) as [ɑɪ], or [əɪ], rhoticity (i.e. pronouncing all R’s), and t-glottalization. Other typical West Country phonetic features did not become pirated, as it were, like h-dropping and fricative voicing (e.g. f →v; s→z). This is only scratching the surface.

It is not right to call the pirate accent exactly the same we West Country, certainly not in the way that many people have taken and simplified such features as it increased in popular use, but it would not exist were it not for the West Country origins.

2774: Dear and Teuer Jul 25, 2024

The words ‘dear’ in English and ‘teuer’ (expensive) in German both originate from the same Proto-Germanic root, but over time they have diverged in meaning and usage. Both ‘dear’ and ‘teuer’ trace their origins back to the Proto-Germanic word *diurijaz, which means ‘precious’ or ‘valuable.’ While the sense of money being valuable (in the sentimental sense) might be clear by itself as a gradual progression in German, the English usage was also reinforced by Old Norse ‘dyr,’ meaning ‘precious.’ Likewise, ‘expensive’ (i.e., teuer) is divergent from the original sense in that it is the reaction to something being valued, but this would be the same sort of relationship as another doublet pair with ‘wet’ being the experience of ‘water,’ each word coming from the same root. ‘Dear’ and ‘teuer’ are yet another of countless examples of cognates with understandably similar but by no means identical meanings.

2773: Wisdom Teeth: Across Languages Jul 24, 2024

When it comes to our third molars, the term "wisdom teeth" might sound a bit funny in English, but it is an example of a larger phenomenon in linguistics of connecting the tooth to wisdom.

In English, we call them "wisdom teeth" because they usually appear between the ages of 17 and 25, when one becomes an adult, and while one’s late teens and early twenties are not thought of as years of wisdom now per se, it would seem they are in this case. Compare

Latin: dentes sapientiae literally "teeth of wisdom."

French: Dents de sagesse with ‘sagesse’ meaning ‘wisdom’.

Spanish: Muelas del juicio for "teeth of judgment," again linking these molars to discernment 

German: Weisheitszähne also "wisdom teeth."

Hebrew: שיני בינה (shenei bina) “teeth of wisdom”

Chinese (Mandarin): 智齿 (zhìchǐ), with 智 meaning wisdom.

All that said, there are some exceptions. Even there, it usually denotes one’s age, or other signs of arriving at adulthood. 

Japanese: 親知らず (oyashirazu) translates to "unknown to the parents," implying that these teeth appear after one has grown up and possibly left the parental home, an indirect nod to maturity but not specifically to wisdom.

Korean: 사랑니 (sarangni) translates to "love teeth," possibly referring to the age at which people start experiencing romantic love, again a marker of coming-of-age but not wisdom per se.

Turkish: The term "20 yaş dişi" translates to "20-year-old tooth," which simply refers to the typical age of emergence without any connotation of wisdom.

The reasons behind these linguistic differences can be attributed to cultural perspectives on aging and maturity. In many Western and Asian cultures, the age at which wisdom teeth appear is seen as a time of gaining knowledge, but rather than going in the direction more like Turkish did and calling them something like “adult teeth” or “matured teeth”, many languages have given a somewhat euphemistic title.

2772: Translating Names: People and Places Jul 23, 2024

In country names, there are endonyms, the same name as a country uses for itself such as France, and exonyms, which are those applied totally foreign such as Germany (native: Deutschland) and Japan (native: Nihon). The trouble is, the concept of endonyms exactly is somewhat tricky to nail down: Italy is the English version, or equivalent, of ‘Italia’ from normal language change, but is still considered an exonym because it does not totally resemble it. Either way, in recent history, the trend has been sharply moving towards endonyms. 

While that is an ongoing debate, this is matter is basically settled when it comes to personal names, i.e. we don’t anymore. This used to be commonplace to translate names, like the Roman, Mark Anthony (Marcus Antonius), Genoese-born Christopher Columbus (Cristoffa Corombo), and a very exceptional case wherein English name of Guy Fawkes was actually adopted in the reverse as Guido Fawkes even in his lifetime because he fought for Spain in the 8 Years War. This practice was common across Europe and indeed the whole world, and everyone from merchants up to heads of state were addressed by different names when they traveled.

Perhaps one of the last major examples of this was with Joseph Stalin, born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, but certainly for most of history through to the early 20th century, this was the norm. This practice died out both for leaders, and around the same time, for people moving into new countries like the USA where previously people’s names were anglicized not by any official pressure, but social expectations, which lessened over the years.

2771: Names Ending -eigh and Feminizing Masculine Names Jul 22, 2024

In recent decades, there has been a trend to give children distinctive names, balancing the perceived need for uniqueness with the desire to avoid raising too many eyebrows. This balance is increasingly achieved through creative spelling. As the trend for distinctiveness grows, it often results in variations around a limited set of tools.

Common names like Ashley and Riley have begun to be spelled with an -eigh ending, resulting in names like Ashleigh and Rileigh. The latter has other variations, with Ryleigh being the most common -eigh ending name of 2017 among a couple hundred now. This trend first emerged in earnest in the 1960s with a handful of names, predominantly Irish and British surnames that were long ago turned into male names and then feminized, such as the two examples above. The spelling could in part be a visual cue of their femininity.

The trend now not only includes classic names with the [i] or [eɪ] sounds at the end, altering their spelling, but also invents new ones. This spelling evolution overlaps with the feminizing of many traditionally masculine names—like how Charlie (and indeed Charleigh) is now more common for girls than boys—especially those ending in [i] or [eɪ] like Kelsey, Lesley, Sydney and Lindsey, seen as is, though Syndeigh and Lindseigh etc. are exclusively for girls. While this trend of giving girls traditionally boys' names, or as a result, neutral names, has seen explosive popularity in recent decades, there is not even one serious contender in the reverse.

2770: Guadalajara, Guadalupe, and Whisky Jul 21, 2024

Spanish does not have [w] as the first sound of a word, and in spelling Spanish only uses W in foreign words, predominantly from English, but there are older loanwords that look differently. In the middle of a word, the sound exists, such as in ‘agua’ [ˈa.ɣ̞wa] (water) but occurs with U after a consonant, so around Iberia, namely around former Andalusia, there are places:

Guadalajara, Guadalupe, Guadix, Guadalcanal, Guadalquivir, Guadalperal Dolmen, some referring to cities, some waterways, but all come from the Arabic وَادِي (wadi) or … وَادِي الْ (wadi al…) which in Arabic standardly refers to a seasonal river that dries up each year, but in Muslim Spain just denoted a river. Since Spanish words don’t naturally begin with [w] the [g] was added for phonetic ease. Of course, unlike with English loan words, Arabic’s are in another writing system which makes wholesale borrowing like Modern Spanish ‘whisky’ (from ‘whiskey’) overall a harder feat too.

In a few even rarer cases the spelling is UA- like in ‘ualabí’ (wallaby), but this very foreign looking and is really used for when enunciating each vowel, like transliterating the city name, Ouagadougou (Uagadugú).

2769: Castor Jul 20, 2024

Many children of recent history may have shuddered at the thought of castor oil, which comes from castor beans, but if they knew where castor, per se, came from, they might not mind the beans (or really, seed) oil. 

Castoreum is a secretion of beavers in multiple glands around their rear ends. It’s potent smell is used in perfumes and historically foods, but on paper has nothing to do with the beans for which it gave its name. Indeed, ‘castor’ just means ‘beaver’ in Greek and this root was then applied to one of their notable features. It seems that there was a misappropriation of the Latin name of another plant, castus, onto the ricin plant that produces the castor beans, but it may be that castor-oil can be used as a cheaper substitute for castoreum in certain contexts, namely for perfumes.

2768: Humus, Homo and Humans Jul 19, 2024

Ancient societies understood that man was made out of the soil of the earth, seen with slight differences in various accounts of creation, and in a modern, scientific age, the word for the species, ‘human,’ has roots in this where ‘man’ does not. The word ‘humus’, taken in the 18th century from Latin, means ‘soil’, but it is from the exact same root as the Latin ‘homo’ meaning ‘human’, and where the English ‘human’ comes from (note that ‘man’ and ‘human’ aren’t related). The word "homo" is etymologically connected to "humus" through the shared Indo-European root *dhghem-, which means "earth" or "ground."

As languages evolved, the meanings of these words became more specialized. "Humus" retained its focus on soil and organic matter, while "homo" became the term for humans, emphasizing human distinctiveness and consciousness. This linguistic divergence reflects the growing complexity of human society and thought.