2839: Cello Sep 28, 2024
The word 'cello' originates as a clipping of the Italian term 'violoncello', which in turn comes from 'violone'. 'Violoncello' translates to "little violone" in Italian, where 'violone' refers to an early form of the double bass. The suffix '-cello' (-elle in Italian) denotes a diminutive form, indicating that the instrument is smaller in size compared to the violone. The term 'violone' itself is derived from 'viola' with the augmentative suffix '-one' (-oon in Italian), emphasizing its larger size compared to the standard viola.
2838: Handle (Social Media) Sep 27, 2024
The term ‘handle’, now commonly associated with online aliases, has roots in the early days of telephone communication. Telephone operators, who physically connected the cables to facilitate calls, utilized the term to refer to identifiers or nicknames for users. This usage emerged from a need for efficiency in managing numerous calls while ensuring clarity and anonymity. Operators would often rely on recognizable, informal monikers to facilitate quicker connections, based off of knowing where to put in the cable ends, or the handle, as it were.
As communication technology evolved, so did the application of ‘handle’. The rise of the Internet in the late 20th century brought new platforms, such as chat rooms and forums, where users sought anonymity and distinct identities. This practice gained traction particularly in gaming and social media, where a user's handle became a key component of their digital persona.
2837: The Power Symbol is from Binary Sep 26, 2024
The power symbol, easily recognized as a circle with a vertical line bisecting it at the top, is born from earlier binary representation. Its design—a fusion of the numeral "1" and the numeral "0"—reflects the binary code that underpins modern computing. This is based off of earlier switches where pushing in one direction turned it on, represented with the 1, and the other direction, off, represented by the 0. Fusing the two together led to the modern power symbol seen around the world.
2836: Littera -ly an Etymological Mystery Sep 25, 2024
The etymology of the Latin term 'littera' presents a conundrum that raises questions about its morphological lineage. Traditionally traced back to the Old Latin form 'leitera' and purportedly linked to the Proto-Indo-European root *h₂leyH- (“smear”), this connection is complicated by the absence of expected morphological forms. Particularly problematic is the assumption of a plural form of the adjective *lei-tos; such a derivation would not align with established patterns for forming participles and gerunds in Latin. Instead, the past participle of 'linō', 'litus', suggests a divergence from the hypothesized *leitos, putting the proposed etymological timeline on shaky ground.
This led to what is known as the littera rule, where a long vowel followed by a short consonant led to a short vowel and a geminated consonant, so in this case from lītus to littus. Thus, while the connection to 'linō' might seem plausible, the available linguistic data fails to provide a coherent account of 'littera's' origins, necessitating a reconsideration of its historical development.
2835: Lexus Sep 24, 2024
The name ‘Lexus’, associated with the luxury vehicle line from Toyota, is intriguing not only for its sleek connotation but also for the ambiguity surrounding its origin. Officially, the name does not derive from any particular word or concept; rather, it was crafted as a distinctive brand identity. However, the absence of a clear etymology has led to a proliferation of theories and myths, particularly involving various acronyms that enthusiasts and linguists alike have proposed. Some of the most popular interpretations include "Luxury Exports to the U.S." or "Luxury Excellence," reflecting an aspirational image for the brand.
This phenomenon highlights a fascinating aspect of linguistics and branding: how names can take on lives of their own, shaped by public perception and cultural narratives. In the absence of a definitive meaning, people instinctively seek to construct interpretations, as happened with the word ‘posh’, among others.
2834: The Spread of Kindergartens Sep 23, 2024
The term ‘kindergarten’ is widely used—sometimes directly borrowed but usually calqued—across many languages across the world, stemming from the German concept developed by Friedrich Froebel in the 19th century. His idea of a "children's garden", literally, emphasizing play-based learning, resonated globally as societies recognized the importance of early childhood education. The spread of this term was facilitated by influential educators who traveled and shared Froebel's methods, but the reason it is so usually calqued into each native language is due international conferences that promoted his educational philosophies. For example, in French, it is translated as "jardin d'enfants" while in Danish its ‘børnehave’. Even outside of Europe, in Armenian, it’s բալիկների պարտեզ (balikneri partez), in Japanese, it’s 幼稚園 (yōchien), and in Hebrew there is a shortened version גן (gan), just ‘garden’.
2033: Fishy Name Rebranding Sep 22, 2024
Many fish undergo rebranding before appearing on restaurant menus to make them more appealing to diners. For instance, the unattractively named ‘Patagonian toothfish’ was transformed into ‘Chilean sea bass’, and the unappetizing ‘slimehead’ became ‘orange roughy’, both of which are now sought-after delicacies. Similarly, the spiny dogfish, a small shark, is often marketed as ‘rock salmon’ in the UK, making it a popular choice for fish and chips. Monkfish, despite its monstrous appearance, is often referred to as ‘American angler’, and skate is sometimes listed by its French name, ‘raie’, to elevate its appeal.
These name changes are driven by a combination of marketing, exoticism, and sustainability. A more exotic name can lend a sense of exclusivity, while renaming underutilized species can introduce them to diners in a more palatable way.
2832: In Spades Sep 21, 2024
The phrase "in spades" is often mistakenly thought to refer to shovels or digging tools, evoking an image of something being piled up in abundance. However, its origin is tied to the card game bridge. In bridge, spades are the highest-ranking suit, trumping all others. When someone has something "in spades," it means they have it in great quantity or with great force, much like having a dominant hand of spades in the game. The metaphor conveys a sense of overwhelming abundance or intensity, far beyond what the image of a shovel would suggest.
2831: Cases (can) Avoid Prepositions Sep 20, 2024
Cases in linguistics refers to nominal declensions, or in other words affixes (usually) that indicate the syntactic function, like the subject, object, indirect object etc.. English functionally has two cases including the genitive [word + ‘s], Classical Latin famously has 5 cases to learn and one or two vestigial forms from others* , and Finnish has an eye-watering 15 cases. Many of these used to exist in other languages, like Latin, but were niche enough to be subsumed by another, usually in the somewhat catch-all ablative case + preposition**, while Finnish has a relatively weak system of prepositions.
For instance, in English to signify X being inside of Y, one uses a preposition like “in Y”, “within Y” or “inside of Y” etc.. In Finnish, along with other Uralic and Baltic languages, mainly Estonian, Hungarian, Lithuanian and Latvian, use the illative case. This transforms, for instance, the Estonian:
Kapp (‘wardrobe’) into Kappi (“inside the wardrobe”) without using prepositions as many other languages would.
*Like the 2nd declension singular vocative case
**The locative case was subsumed in part by the accusative, and the vocative became part of the nominative case.
2830: New Capital N Sep 19, 2024
Looking at these examples of logos altogether [see photo], there is a notable trend of using a lowercase-style <n> in an all-capital font. Some of these examples have long histories, including 7-Eleven with 6 variations using this version of <n> beginning in 1968, and Wendy’s that has also had 6 <n> versions since 1969 until 2013, and even more notably used a regular capital <N> in its slogan “old fashioned burgers”. ESPN has also always used the lowercase version, and the other two examples are newer, so it cannot be considered a trend so much as a phenomenon, which doesn’t even have a name.
You might be able to call this a small majuscule-n meaning that even when lower case it is made to fit the same height and base as all the rest of the letters in a line, but historically all majuscule fonts are upper case, uncial scripts. This is in contrast with miniscule scripts where some letters can have sections that go above or below the imaginary lines where the letters fit.
The exact reason for this is unclear, but it also seems to have come from different reasons. In the case of 7-Eleven, about which many articles and company statements exist, it is supposedly that the founder’s wife simply thought it looked nicer. In the other cases, it is less obvious, if any concrete reason exists. This is not a modern trend either per se, as is the all-lowercase design, but may also help with visual balance, and given its rounder and less jagged shape per the same width, may be an attempt to look friendlier. Overall, it is not particularly widespread, but seems to be the most widespread of its kind of single-letter lowercase type
If you have any more information or more examples, please add a comment with more.
2829: Decline of Humorous Words Sep 18, 2024
Although no one seriously believes in the theory of the Four Humors, or humourism—that four specific bodily fluids control more or less all aspects of health and also personality—this was an important idea for thousands of years that shaped medicine, such as in the practice of bloodletting and the idea cholera was caused by an abundance of choler (yellow bile), but also it appears in language. Plenty of these have been covered on the blog before, including
Humor and humid
Melancholy and by extension choleric
Some of these words, on the other hand, have mostly fallen by the wayside, such as ‘phlegmatic’ meaning ‘lethargic, sluggish’ which was relatively common still in the early 19th century and declining precipitously from there, and likewise with ‘sanguine’ (from blood) meaning ‘warm, optimistic’ on a similar if not more sudden drop. ‘Bilious’ is not so common now, but it was never as common as the others, but another bile-related humor term, ‘lurid’ has increased in popularity, once only related to the sickly pale-yellow and by extension horror, it has now actually gained more meanings to mean shocking or graphic. On the whole, these have seen a sharp decline with the rise of modern medicine, and even where the words are still in use, no one would connect them at all to bodily fluids.
2828: Isle of Stomach Pain Sep 17, 2024
There is an island in the Mediterranean off the coast of Sardinia called Mal di Ventre, translating literally from Standard Italian as “stomach pains”. There are plenty of places named for miserable reasons, including Australia’s “Lake Disappointment,” but this one was not named in relation to stomachs, at least not on purpose. Looking at the native Sardinian name, “Malu 'Entu” meaning “bad winds” (and not those related to stomach pains), which was mistranslated, but given it has no inhabitants, there was very little need to change the name in Standard Italian.
2827: Peace Symbol ☮ Sep 16, 2024
The peace symbol, ☮, known also as the CND symbol, was made for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, but even its creator did not give a single, clear answer after it was first displayed in 1958 to protest outside of the Nuclear Weapons Research Center in London. While he said that the symbol was supposed to be reminiscent of someone kneeling with his arms outstretched, his original explanation is that it comes from flag semaphore, specifically from the overlap of signals of someone making an N and a D, for “nuclear disarmament”. Ultimately, even if it was abstracted, that would possibly make this one of the last major uses of flag semaphore for any vaguely communicative or at least symbolic purpose in modern life.
2826: Origins of Hanged-Hung Split Sep 15, 2024
Everyone knows that the past tense of ‘hang’ is ‘hung’ except in the context of execution in which case it’s ‘hanged’, but why is that?
As discussed in yesterday’s post, when there is a semantic split between strong and weak forms of a verb, as there is here, the basic sense (as in “he hung a picture”) is strong and the more distant sense, referring to execution, is weak (“they hanged a criminal”). What’s notable about this set up is that ‘hanged’ is the ‘older’ form, and ‘hung’ only started to develop in the late 16th century. While the trend for most verbs is that strong forms are giving way to weak ones (see more on that here), there are a few that have bucked this trend, like ‘hung’ and more recently ‘snuck’. Either direction however, in many cases, the older form clung on in specific contexts, though even that has changed for ‘hanged’, which used to be used in all formal and especially legal contexts, but phrases like a ‘hung jury’ do not use the weak form.
2825: A Strong and Weak Verb Sep 14, 2024
Usually, a verb is either weak, meaning it has an affixed morphological change for (usually) tense, like bike-biked, while strong verbs have an internal vowel change like sing-sang-sung. In German, the verb ‘bewegen’ displays an interesting morphosyntactic divergence: it behaves as a strong verb when used in the sense of “to persuade” (past tense bewog, subjunctive bewöge), but as a weak verb when meaning “to move” (bewegte, bewegt). This split likely reflects a process of semantic differentiation within the language, where older, strong conjugations tend to be preserved in metaphorical or abstract meanings (like “to persuade”), while the more literal usage (like “to move”) has shifted towards a weak pattern. This sort of pattern exists in English, but usually the later-occurring and more metaphoric type meaning is the one to be weak, which is not the case with ‘bewegen’.
2824: The Origins of Ge’ez Sep 13, 2024
Egyptian hieroglyphs eventually led to the modern alphabets that most of the world uses, but that is mostly because of the widespread proliferation of Phoenician writing, which you should read more about here. However, there was another offshoot early on. Before Phoenician writing even existed, there was the Proto-Sinaitic script which is the first alphabetic type writing to emerge from hieroglyphs. This eventually evolved into Phoenician, but it also led to the South Semitic writing system, turning into (among other now-extinct systems) Old South Arabian, used in what is now Yemen. With Old North Arabian scripts dying out by the 4th century AD, the only surviving descendant of what were once many scripts tracing their lineage to South Semitic writing is Ge’ez, used for a number of languages in Ethiopia and Eritrea, notably Tigrinya and Amharic.
This makes Ge’ez, with all of its local variations, possibly the only alphabetic writing system with ancient roots not directly linked with the Phoenicians.
2823: Sturdy: Unsturdy Etymologies Sep 12, 2024
The word sturdy, as most adjectives with a -y ending, would imply that there is a word ‘sturd’, which doesn’t exist, but actually the situation is more complicated; it comes from the Old French word ‘estourdi’ (now ‘etourdi’), which would explain English spelling, except that Middle English had ‘sturdy’ with the -y. The problem with this answer is that the Modern English, Middle English, and Old French words all mean completely different things: firm, powerful - with both valiant and tyrannical connotations, and dazed, respectively.
In the case of Middle English to Modern English, that change of meanings is relatively easy to grasp, especially that it seems to have been influenced by another word ‘stor’ that also meant ‘bold’ or ‘sturdy’, and that the meanings over time merged and narrowed. It is not clear how the Old French origins led to this though. Complicating the origins yet further, ‘estourdi’ would appear to be the result of the natural evolution from the Latin “ex- + turdus” meaning “out of/ through a thrush”, as in the bird. The best explanation, semantically, is that the thrush in some way connoted drunkenness, leading to the sense of ‘dazed’, as in someone who has suffered a strong blow to the head. This sense of strength or firmness may have led to ‘sturdy’ as we have it in English.
It could also be that the original sense in English, including the idea of ‘rough’ or ‘coarse’, came from a connotation of drunkenness, which then evolved to mean “strong/firm.” However, this is not clear, and no one knows exactly how it came to take on an almost opposite meaning from the Old French. Despite a plethora of historical and linguistic explanations, major bodies like the Oxford and Cambridge dictionaries do not consider these theories plausible.
2822: Advice and Trees Sep 11, 2024
In Hebrew, the words for ‘wood’ (etz) עֵץ and ‘advice’ (etzah) עֵצָה are etymologically related, sharing a common root (ע-צ-ה, ʿ-ṣ-h). This root, as it were, connecting these two concepts conveys the sense of firmness or strength. The noun (etz) עֵץ refers to ‘wood’ or also simply ‘tree’, suggesting something solid and enduring. Similarly, (etzah) עֵצָה, meaning ‘advice’ or ‘counsel’, carries the connotation of something firm and reliable—guidance that one can depend upon, much like the sturdiness of wood. This quality of semantic relationship is common in many languages, where words for tangible objects are also reflected in abstract qualities.
2821: Umpteen is from Morse Code Sep 10, 2024
The word umpteen—a playful, indefinite number that suggests a large but unknown quantity—has its origins in the slang of Morse code operators. In the early 20th century, telegraphists often used the word ‘umpty’ or just ‘ump’, probably as a mimic of the sound, for the Morse code signal for a dash (–). Over time, ‘umpty’ began to be used as slang for an unspecified number, either in reference to its technically undefined length, or more likely just slang from its being the longer sound. The word ‘umpteen’ later emerged as a playful extension of "umpty," influenced by the suffix ‘-teen’ to sound like a real number but also that it sounds similar.
This usage was well suited to the period’s evolving English slang, which often drew on technological innovations and military jargon during WWI when we see it emerge, with ‘umpty’ peaking in popularity before 1919, and umpteen, which has only become more popular through to today is first found in 1914 before completely overtaking in well under a decade.
2820: Laconic Sep 9, 2024
The word ‘laconi'c’ describes a style of speaking that is brief and to the point, a trait famously associated with the Spartans of ancient Greece. The term comes from Laconia, the region where Sparta was located. While ‘Sparta’ is the more familiar term today, ‘Laconia’ referred to the entire territory under Spartan control, which included several towns beyond the city itself. The Spartans were known for their terse, direct way of speaking, reflecting their values of discipline and austerity. On the other hand, the term ‘laconicum’ is Latin for what we might call a dry sauna, which isn’t exactly related to savage living.