WordFixx

The suffix -ology is a Latin one, meaning a study or branch of knowledge. It's getting a bit abused these days, crammed onto non-Latin words to make things sound smart. I'm sorry, but they just bother me. It's like mixing apples and oranges.  I will use Google Ngrams to find when each word comes into play. Angelology - the study of angels?  I'm surprised I couldn't find a more academic word for this. MW has the first known use going back to 1663.  On my Ngram searches, the word starts to appear as far back as 1830.  There is a definitive work - Angelology by George Clayton (1851) - that does establish the age of the word and gives is a boost that it never comes back down from.  And the word is in the Universal American Dictionary as far back as 1861. Bumpology - This is a sarcastic name for "Phrenology", the disgraced old study of measuring the bumps on people's heads to determine their personality and values.  This one gets a thumbs up for being an...

Every 4th year, February gets an extra day, the 29th. This gives us a calendar year that's 365-1/4 days long. But how exactly is it a "leap year" if we make the year longer? How is that leaping over anything? It's more of a drag year, because it drags on for an extra day. This is a good example of how priorities have changed. The reason it's called a leap year is ... because it makes fixed festival days "leap" ahead one day in the week. The term goes back to Middle English. By the way, this calendar we use is called the Gregorian calendar, named after Pope Gregory XIII, who declared its use on Feb. 24, 1582. It replaced the older Julian calendar whose year was a little bit too long, and even skipped 10 days to try and get caught up. It's an interesting story. To be exact, our actual year is 365.242 days, and a leap year was defined as "every year divisible by 4 except for centenary years not divisible by 400", which does a good...

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?

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 ...

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...

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...

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...