Poor Frankenstein

Names can get mixed up, too. Real or fictional people can become legends, or end up garbled and forgotten. A classic case is poor Frankenstein. If you're picturing the big lumbering monster with the bolts in his neck ... oops. Frankenstein was the doctor who created the monster. The monster was simply known as "the monster" or "Frankenstein's Monster."

Strangely, "Franken-" has become a prefix on its own. I've heard big ugly things named that way, from a Frankencouch to a Frankenpuppy. I wonder if this was urged along by the old FrankenBerry cereal? Sure is a weird thing to make a prefix out of, especially considering the original Franken- thing was not a monster, but a mad scientist. Now, where does Al Franken fit into all this?

RPGs, WFPs & UFOs

With so many abbreviations and acronyms flying around in a typical conversation, you'd think we would have run out of letters by now. In fact, we have. But an acronym doesn't have to be unique in any universal sense, only unique within the subculture that uses it, or the context it appears in. As an example, RPG means "Role-playing Game" AND "Rocket-propelled Grenade." Even if you found a gamer who was on the front lines, properly equipped, he'd still know from the context whether a grenade or a game book was called for. Likewise, with "WFP," who would confuse the "World Food Program" with "Windows File Protection"? Though there's also a "Witness for Peace" organization for nonviolent activism.

While any word can be used as a code for something else, acronyms are well suited to this, due to their inherent mystery. I recall many conversations in college where "UFO" had nothing to do with flying saucers. When one of the guys said "UFO at 9 o'clock", that UFO meant "Unidentified Female Object."

Laser, Maser, Phaser, Taser

Here's a family of words which came from acronyms, and we should be grateful that the full expressions have faded away. Laser comes from "Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation". Maser is a less common term, with Microwaves instead of Light -- some stars are known to focus beams of radiation in the microwave part of the spectrum, oddly, it's a useful tracer of water molecules.

For phaser (the fictional zap gun of the Star Trek series), there are two known acronyms: "Photon Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation" and "PHASed Energy Rectification". These were probably invented after the fact, in one of the technical manuals. When scripts are being written and brainstormed, the gadgets just have to sound cool.

Now, the taser (electronic shock gun) is a funny story. It was named by its inventor Jack Cover in 1969 (or 1972), who was a fan of the Tom Swift sci-fi adventure books. The title "Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle" obviously stuck in his head, and may have inspired him to make the fictional weapon real. TASER stands for "Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle."

TASER International's company trivia page: http://taser.com/company/Pages/trivia.aspx

Salary -- worth your salt?

Considering how many people bring home a salary, it's funny how the origin of the word has gotten lost. Salary is from the Latin salarium, which was the allowance given to Roman soldiers for buying salt. Salt was a large part of the economy for many early civilizations. Salt was needed for preserving meats, and played a role in history right up to the time of Gandhi.

Of course, there is plenty of debate over exactly what form of salt payment was involved. Some say there were direct payments made in salt, either in containers or rock-hard ingots or disks; others stick with the allowance idea; others that it was simply the right to purchase a certain amount of salt from royal storehouses. It may have been tried different ways in different centuries. However it was done, there has salt in our salary ever since.

From the early salt trade comes two opposite expressions of the value of human life: a person can be "the salt of the earth" (high value, righteous, honest) or "not worth your salt" (low value, lazy, dishonest).

crap & crapper

Sorry, but I can't resist this one. After the last entry about brand names turning into nouns and verbs, this one popped into my head. We've all heard of toilets being called "crappers." But there's an odd legend that the toilet was actually invented by a guy named Thomas Crapper. Apparently, this was a real man, who was a well-known plumber and sanitation engineer with some patents -- his company name did appear on many toilet tanks, and supposedly the World War I soldiers came to call the whole toilet a crapper as a result.

This site has the best dicussion of it:
LINK

However, "crap" has a long history or being applied to crappy things, from weeds to chaff to the dregs of beer. In various forms, it has been with us since the 15th century. And Mr. Crapper's name probably came from Cropper, a respectable trade.

So, this is another brand name gone native, and a caution about letting related words lead us astray. The odds that we would crap in a crapper, and the two words not be related in the obvious way, is a real linguistic comedy.

xerox

One of the strangest ways that words creep into our language is through product names and company names. A product can be so successful that its name becomes a synonym for the object itself, like Kleenex (tissue).

The word "xerox" is a fascinating case. In 1937, an electrostatic printing method was invented by American law student Chester Carlson, who called it xerography (Greek: "dry printing") and the company Xerox brought it to market in the 1950s, replacing the clunky old mimeograph process. The word "Xerox" was trademarked in 1948. By the mid-1980s, people were using "xerox" as both a noun and a verb, to describe what are now known as "photocopies." It seems to me that this usage has peaked, and has been falling off. I hear "make copies" much more than "xerox it" these days, but this may be a regional distinction.

In any case, this is an example of a monumental success for a product, and how language shifts to accomodate it. A certain degree of success makes a brand a household word, the same way that fame makes people a household name. But even then, very few of these things become nouns or verbs.

Naturally, the exact company history is a little more complex, with a few earlier companies (Haloid Co, Rectigraph, Batelle) working together to form the company we know today.
See Xerox Company history

A story of months

Our modern English month names contain some odd references to forgotten gods and rituals.

"January" comes from Janus (a.k.a. Januarius) the god of doorways; a sensible Latin root for the month which is the gateway to the New Year. Janus is considered to be looking forward AND looking backward, or as doorkeeper, he watches the inside and outside. Interesting character.

"February" comes from the Latin purification festival Februa, which fell on Feb. 15 on the old Roman calendar.

"March" is named after Mars, the god of war (Latinized as Martius). Being the first month of spring, some logical connection can be made -- this is the month when warfare started up again after taking the winter off.

"April" is a bit obscure. One guess is that is comes from Latin "aperire" ("to open"), being the month when most flowers bloomed.

"May" is a short word which doesn't give many clues. But it may be named after the fertility goddess Maia, being a month of great abundance.

"June" is named after the Roman goddess Juno, derived from the Greek goddess Hera, wife of Jupiter (Zeus).

"July" was named in honor of Julius Caesar.

"August" was named after Augustus Caesar.

The rest of our month names are simply numbers, as mentioned in the previous post.