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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

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 Electri

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

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

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 shift

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

September?

Okay, what could possibly be strange about the word "September?" Well, "sept" is the Latin root for "seven", but it's the ninth month of our modern year. It hints at the tumultuous history behind our modern calendar. The Julian calendar was a bit longer than an actual year, and I think by the time it was replaced by the Gregorian calendar (in 1582) it was a full two months behind. There's a weirder note here: we only have 8 named months, and the rest -- September (7), October (8), November (9) and December (10) -- are just numbers. Our lives are run by clocks and calendars, and you'd think we'd have proper names for the months by now. Note that July was named Quintillus (5) before being renamed to celebrate Julius Caesar, and August was Sextilis (6) before being renamed after Augustus Caesar. At an early stage, the Romans considered winter to be without months. The number shift may also have happened when January and February were inse

Snafu & Fubar

A lot of words come from acronyms, like "scuba" ("Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus") or "radar" ("RAdio Detecting And Ranging"). Some of these catch on and some don't. My favorite pair is "snafu" ("Situation Normal, All Fouled Up") and "fubar" ("Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition"). They are both credited to the military, where a stressed-out acceptance of chaos is not unusual. Those are the polite versions, of course. They're more commonly used with the F-word, which itself has a legend attached to it saying it was derived from "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge." But if the word was a recent construction, there wouldn't be related forms like fukka (Norwegian), focka (Swedish), fyke (Middle English), and other things that will get my blog blocked overseas. ;-) Sometimes, word use or borrowing goes too far, and meaning begins to fail. Most tutorials on computer programmin

xu & dong

This one goes out to all you Scrabble players out there. The xu is an aluminum penny used in Vietnam, and there are 100 xu in a dong. It's a handy word in the game, since you can get more mileage out of your X's if you use it liberally. You might wonder how foreign currency qualifies as an English word. In some sense, it falls under the jargon of international commerce. Or the lingo of numismatists (coin collectors). After all, if a coin is worth one xu, why not called it a xu? The only other choice is to make up even more obscure words. By the way, "dong" is from the Chinese "tong" or copper coin. NO connection to what "dong" has come to mean in English. A weird Wikipedia tangent shows the acronym XU as "a clandestine intelligence organisation working on behalf of Allied powers in occupied Norway during World War II." Here's the Link.

et al.

I don't know how many people pay attention to the references and bibilographies tucked away in the tail end of the books they read. I've always found them fascinating, hints that there are more and more books to read. An infinite series of words to track down. When a book has multiple authors, you'll often see the primary author's name followed by "et al." This is short for a Latin expression meaning "and others". The trouble is, in Latin you have the masculine "et alii", feminine "et aliae" and neuter "et alia", and I don't know which you'd use for a group of mixed gender. Conveniently, "et al." can also be use for "et alibi" ("and other places"), so by all accounts, that little "et al." is a handy kind of shorthand. Note that the word "alibi" has its legal meaning of being somewhere else (at the moment of a crime), but it is also used in common speech for

Intro to WordFixx

I have always enjoyed folklore, and as a writer for the past 20 years I've used my share of words, so I don't know why it took so long to realize that I had accumulated a lot of stories about words. Word lore. I get a kick out of the streams of words that appear during conversations, each with its own history -- an insanely creative flow of bits and pieces accumulated over centuries. On the flipside, I'm a bit concerned when I talk to other writers who have no idea of what they're tapping into. I guess if you're writing technical documents, your main focus is accuracy, but my poet half won't let me stop there. I think there is a lot to be gained by understanding the words we use, or, a lot to be lost by forgetting their meanings and history. Few things are as important to a culture as their language. Words can last for ages, words are part of our identity, and we can discover historical hints hidden in our word lore. Even more, every job has its own vocab