697: metaphysician and physicist Nov 4, 2016

Someone who studies physics is a physicist, but someone who studies metaphysics is a metaphysician, not a metaphysicist. Even though Aristotle was a terrible physicist, believing that the reason objects move is due to what are essentially spirits he called 'movers', both of those words are based on his studies. 'Metaphysics' means 'after physics' referring to the work that came after the his book which was interpreted concerning ‘the science of things transcending what is physical or natural’. 'Physics' also denotes the work of Aristotle, but in this case, what was written in his actual books. These words, as well as 'physic' which is specific to medicine and has the adjectival form 'physician' all come from 'phusika' meaning ‘natural things’ in Greek. The different adjectival forms would not have always carried specific meanings, but over time the conventional ways became standard.

696: font Nov 3, 2016

When you want to change fonts on a word document, you just melt down metal alloys and shape them into letters, right? Almost certainly wrong, but only because of the era in which this audience lives. For printing presses, all of the keys and fonts had to be created physically out of metal. The word 'font' comes from the French word, 'fondre' meaning 'to melt', as do related the words, 'founder' and 'found' as in molding metal.

695: picture and painting Nov 2, 2016

A person who's good at using paints or words can paint a picture, and with a camera, someone can take a picture, and though one can picture an image of a picture, no one can picture something in order to create a material object. It is a bit of syntax that English doesn't have, though historically it makes sense; both 'picture' and 'paint' come from the French past participle of 'peindre', ultimately from the Latin, 'pingere' meaning 'to paint', although the creation of 'picture' was also affected by the Latin, 'pictura'. Even though the words derive from verbs, their origins as participles, which are not verbs but verbal-adjectives have influenced the way we speak.

694: FSI Levels Nov 1, 2016

Suppose that you're a native English-speaker and you have exactly 575-600 hours on your hands, which would be the best choice of languages to start to learn? The Foreign Service Institute has ranked languages by how difficult it would be to learn from an English-speaking background into 5 levels, level 5 being the hardest. If you continue supposing from before, you'd likely want to learn a Romance language, or a few select North Germanic (e.g. Swedish or Danish) and West Germanic (e.g. Dutch or Afrikaans) because they all have fairly similar grammar and vocabulary, though not German nor Icelandic as even since they're related in many ways, they have complex grammar. This categorization does not take into account certain things like phonetics, but even if it did, the categories are rough estimations, and could not apply to all people with their different brains and experiences.

693: witch Oct 31, 2016

Happy Halloween everyone; with all of the costumes people wear, it can be tricky to remember which witch is which. The word 'witch' comes from the Old English, 'wicche', which gives Modern English, 'witch' and the religion, 'Wicca', but not 'wizard'; that word comes from another word, 'wysard' which is derived from the word for 'wise'. It would probably not be surprising to learn that, 'wicken' in Middle High German, meaning 'bewitch', is related to the root for 'witch', but 'wīh', the Old High German word for 'holy' is thought to be too, counter to the way we might think of witches today. Surprising as well, but the Latin for 'victim' is believed to be related to 'wīh' as well.

692: flavor Oct 30, 2016

A fairly straightforward, albeit superficial, question one might get asked would be, "what's your favorite flavor of ice cream?", though certainly far fewer people would ask, "what is your favorite flavor of flower?". This would not always have been the case; back in Middle English, the word, 'flavor' meant, 'fragrance', or 'aroma', which comes from the Old French 'flaor'. Some have suggested that 'flavor was created as a an alteration of the Latin, 'flatus' meaning ‘blowing’ or as a combination with 'foetor' meaning ‘stench’. Either way, 'flatus' not only gave English, 'flavor' denoting strong scents, but also the word 'flatulent'. Where, I hear you asking, did the V comes from then? It seems to have entered the word by association with the word 'savor' around the time when the word changed, connoting taste instead of olfactory.

691: glaucous, glaucoma, and glaucope Oct 29, 2016

If you wanted to describe something, in a word, as a pale yellow, you could of course just say, 'yellowish', but the more pretentious way is with the word, 'glaucous'. The word comes from the Latin, 'glaucous', which means both 'gleaming' but also 'gray', which is why this word, now predominantly used to denote a yellowy color has also sometimes been used to describe any pale color, especially those of leaves in autumn. Yet, perhaps less pretty is that the root, 'glauc-' has given English the word 'glaucoma', as the condition makes the scope of what one sees, over time, become gray. There are plenty more words, though all fairly obscure that have this root as well, including 'glaucope': someone with blond hair and blue eyes.

690: Profession Oct 28, 2016

If someone were to make a confession, that person would have confessed; if there is a recession, then say, the economy, would recess; but if someone had a profession, what does that person profess? This is not some fluke of English: a few centuries ago 'profession' would have made a lot more sense. Back when the word was used in Middle English, a professional could only be a clergyman, in that 'profession' denoted the oath that one would take to enter a religious order. At the time, these professions would be, quite literally, professed, as not only was this an oath, but also may have been fairly public. Later on, people would be thought of professing that which the were skilled at doing, thus relating to jobs.

689: protocol, colloid, and cholera Oct 27, 2016

As has been illustrated on this blog a number of times, words don't need to have similar meanings, or altogether similar appearances to be related. A protocol may not seem similar a glue, and it wouldn't really have either at any point as an English work, first denoting a record of legal agreement. The word comes ultimately from the Greek, 'prōtokollon' meaning, ‘first page’ from the parts, 'prōtos' which means ‘first’ and can be found in a great many other words such as 'prototype', and 'kolla' which means ‘glue’. The other sense of 'protocol' derives from French, 'protocole', which was etiquette intended for the French head of state, which was later adopted into English in the 19th century. A colloid, though it does not have any politico-legal meaning, is a substance that has qualities of both liquids or solids, originally coming from the Greek—you guessed it—'kolla' and, '-oid' which as a suffix means 'resembling'. Additionally, although 'choler' and 'cholera' come from 'khole' meaning 'bile, its main structural protein, 'collagen', comes from 'kolla' as well.

688: revamp, vamp, and avant-garde Oct 26, 2016

Though the word has certainly changed, 'revamp', quite intuitively, comes from 'vamp' which for cobblers is the upper from part of a shoe, and as a verb means 'to fix a vamp', but in Jazz is a simplistic short passage which is often repeated. Both of these senses come from the Latin, 'avant pie'. You may recognize 'avant' from 'avant garde', which means 'advanced guard' which has come to denote the way that troop under Napoleon dressed: very lavishly and impractically. The whole phrase together, means "before the foot (pie)", which is reasonable for shoemakers, but for musicians, and later in the word, 'revamp', it took on the meaning of improvisation.

687: addiction and diction Oct 25, 2016

There are a great many things to which someone could be addicted, whether it be a substance like a drug or an action like gambling. Nevertheless, probably there are not many people addicted to speech (though perhaps a few radical linguists). 'Addiction' has taken on a slightly different meaning from the root, a Latin verb 'addicere' meaning 'to favor', and comes from the root word 'dicere' meaning 'to say', giving English both, 'addiction' but also 'diction'. Interestingly, even though this word dates back centuries or even millennia, the word 'addict' to refer to someone who is addicted to something was first recorded in only 1909.

686: scotch Oct 24, 2016

What's something that everyone needs and loves, children and adults alike: scotch...tape that is. 'Scotch' means a great many things, including, whiskey a brand of tape, a people, and as a verb it means to cut, and to wedge or end. As a verb, no one is quite sure where the word came from, though some believe it is related to 'skate' which can be also a sort of cutting wedge. Though the verbal sense is found in Shakespeare's Macbeth, and may be historically interesting, it is the noun that is more often used more often. This instead does not come from the meaning of 'wedge' but instead relates to the Scottish people. Today, the word is considered somewhat offensive when referring to the people, but for the whiskey, nobody pays much mind.

685: confide, confident, & confidant(e) Oct 23, 2016

If you trust yourself you'd be confident, and if you trust someone else, you might confide information. 'Confide' comes from the Latin word, ''fidere' meaning 'to trust'—with the prefix 'con-' used as an intensifier—which gave English the words, 'fidelity' 'faith' and 'fealty' (and all the derivatives thereof). For the word 'confide', however, even though there is the nominal form, 'confidence', this does not reflect the meaning of trusting something or someone else, as much as general trust, so after a couple of centuries using 'confidence', 'English got the word, 'confidant(e)'.

684: Jacquerie Oct 24, 2016

A good way of dismissing some person or idea is to trivialize it. There have been, in the whole of France's history, a number of revolts, revolutions, and uprisings, but not all of them were as significant as the others. The first jacquerie, however, to be called such was in in the 1350's when the peasants revolted against the nobility who had mockingly nicknamed peasants, 'Jacques' or 'Jacques Bonhomme'. For about a century and a half, this word was not used to describe other revolts, but eventually superseded the other usage, which is still employed on occasion, such as in Dicken's Tale of Two Cities.

683: Lost Languages Oct 21, 2016

History is told by those whom have power. While it is very fun to compare languages, and see how words change over time, it ought to be remembered that we do not have all of the words that there are or have been. Currently, around of 90% of languages do not have written forms, and this is despite modern efforts to create standardized writing systems, so it is not difficult to imagine that older languages are often forgotten. Some languages, like the now-extinct relatives of Basque can't even be recreated very much in the way that Proto-Indo-European was, because there aren't enough non-Indo-European languages related to it that still exists.

682: munich and berlin Oct 20, 2016

One can tell a lot about a place from its coat of arms, which is good because otherwise there would not be much use for the coat of arms. The coat of arms for Bavarian capital, Munich, for example is of a monk holding a book and pointing, and ones have also depicted a monk for many centuries. The German name for the city helps to interpret this symbol, as 'München' means, 'of monks', and shows off Christian history. The better known coat of arms for Berlin is a bear, but this is misleading. While the symbol was based off of the similarity to the name, 'Berlin' does not come from the German 'Bär' (bear) but is of Slavic origin, as most German cities with '-in' endings do, and may derive from a word for 'swamp'.

681: termite Oct 19, 2016

It might be easy, even for those with mighty brain-power, to assume that 'termites' are a type of mite. There are ordinarily plenty of words which can't act as their own words, but still attach to other words, e.g. a 'cran' is not a type of berry even though we have 'cranberry'. This would be an example of what is called a "bound morpheme", and the sure only way to know that 'ter-' is not one is to look it up. In fact, while 'mite' comes from Old English, 'termite' comes from Latin, or you could also look and see that their scientific names are completely different. Termites are also sometimes called, 'white ants', but this is equally misleading.

680: awake versus awaken Oct 18, 2016

It is easy to confuse the words 'awake' and 'awaken', especially in their present forms. What makes this especially tricky is that even though there are some definitions that attempt to match the conventional uses, the two uses are not very different. Both have transitive and intransitive meanings, so whether the word takes a direct object isn't generally too helpful, but generally 'awake' has less extreme meanings, and also tends to be used only relating to sleep rather than existence as a whole, so while one might awake on a quiet Sunday morning, some mystical powers can be awaken. Other related words, 'wake' and 'waken' are a bit easier to distinguish, most notably because 'waken' is transitive.

679: -nik Oct 17, 2016

It isn't uncommon, especially from an English-speaking perspective, to come across words borrowed from other languages for a multitude of reasons. Less common, perhaps, is to find affixes that are borrowed from other languages directly, though it does still happen. The suffix '-nik' was used quite commonly in the 1950's for different nicknames for satellites and other crafts shot off into space. Also from the same word, it became applied to other words which meant someone who was associated with a particular thing, giving us 'beatnik' and other words as well.

678: second Oct 16, 2016

For most words, there is a reason that people use them, especially if the word can mean more than one idea. A second is called such because it is the third division of periods of time within a day...sort of. The first is a division of the day into two sets of twelve hours, which was devised at least a few thousand years ago. The Greeks took this originally Egyptian model, defined the hours more precisely, and then divided that further into minutes and seconds, more or less as we know them today. The term 'second' comes in because it is the second sexagesimal division: a sixtieth of a sixtieth of an hour. 'Minute' also comes from the concept of division, as it comes from the Latin for 'lessen'. For more on 'minute', see this post.