WordFixx

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...

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...