WordFixx

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.

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 ...

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...