1388: Invaluable and Valuable (LITW 6) Sep 29, 2018
Contronyms certainly do exist, when a word is its own opposite, like 'inflammable', but there are also words that have negating prefixes and mean the same thing, again like 'flammable' and 'inflammable', which can—though not necessarily will—mean the same thing. A common misconception is that 'invaluable' is synonymous with 'valuable', but this is not really true. Given that 'invaluable' means that it is so indispensable as to make it impossible to put a value or price on it, it is more precious than something merely valuable. In this way, while 'inflammable' and 'flammable' can synonymous or antonymous, 'invaluable' and 'valuable' are never truly synonymous, though neither are they totally opposite.
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1387: Ground vs Grinded Sep 28, 2018
In a dictionary, it will list the forms of 'grind' including the participle 'ground' and "(rare) grinded". Some spell-checking programs will even count 'grinded' as a misspelling, but this is becoming less accurate. 'Ground is still used dominantly for most grammatical objects, but in newer usages of the word the preferred participle is 'grinded'. This tends to crop up when the subject matter is about dancing, sex, or relating to marijuana, for which any form of 'grind' is fairly new. This could be because people don't care about traditional grammar, or because they are consciously trying to distinguish the two.
1386: Strict Naming Laws Sep 27, 2018
Some countries have stricter laws concerning given names than others, and arguably, some of the strictest may be in Scandinavia. In Sweden, names have to be approved if parents wish to buck certain traditional names, or use alternative spellings. Moreover there are tens of thousands of surnames reserved for royals, and no one else is allowed to have these. These have even led people to go to court, such as when parents sued for not being allowed to spell 'Albin' as 'Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116' or later 'A', though obviously these people weren't doing this for the name, but as a protest of the rules. However, in Iceland it may be stricter, since there are only 1,700 approved names for boys and 1,800 for girls, and the surname must be a parent's first name plus '-son' or '-dottir' for sons and daughters.
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1385: 'line in Given Names Sep 26, 2018
In German, the suffix '-lein' such as in 'Fräulein' is a diminutive suffix. There are some distant relatives of this in English, but clearer traces of it can be found in given names. For instance, 'Emmeline' uses this suffix on a word that originally meant 'work', so it should be clarified that diminutive doesn't always directly translate to 'little' and does have an emotional component as well. However, not all names with '-line' come from this. 'Caroline', which is the French diminutive of 'Charles' has a similar—though not identical suffix—but Madeline (spelt many different ways) comes from '(Mary) Magdalene', such that what looks like a suffix is built into the name, as is likewise the case for 'Evangeline'.
1384: The Family of 'As' Sep 25, 2018
As mentioned the other day, 'like' as a preposition or a conjunction is a bit of a Germanic anomaly, but in some ways so is 'as'. While 'like' is pretty much on its own in terms of linguistic relatives, 'as' is related to the Dutch and German 'als', however, the context in which all three are used is very different for the most part. In German, 'als' can mean 'as', but would normally translate as 'than', and would be able to introduce comparative relative clauses in a way that 'as' usually does not, and in Dutch it functions mostly the same as German, though not completely. In this case—as would probably be imagined—German is more traditionally Germanic than English, as 'as' relates to 'also' and used to be able to introduce more clauses than it can now, or if you will, "it introduced more clauses as [it is able to] now". Moreover, 'similar' also has a shared root to 'as' and is where the Danish 'som' of the same meaning comes from.
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1383: arm and army Sep 24, 2018
There's a pretty obvious link between the English 'arm' and the word 'army', but in German, French, and Russian—all belonging to different language families—the words are also very similar to the English. The words 'armee', 'armée' and 'армия (armiya)' respectively are clearly related to the English word 'army', but only German has a word that is also related to the body part 'arm' ("Der Arm"). This might seem to suggest that French and Russian—if not other Romantic or Slavic languages—borrowed their word from some Germanic language, but 'army' in this case comes from Latin, where it originated from 'arma' which meant 'tools' but lead to the verb 'armare' meaning 'to arm'. It is only a coincidence that French and Russian took other words for 'arm' and did not use the same Info-European root. Coincidentally, 'armoire' and 'amber' also come from this root, but took a different interpretation of 'tool'.
1382: Like as a Conjunction Sep 23, 2018
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1381: -ious: A Suffix with 2 Origins Sep 22, 2018
1380: Why Sumerians Rotated their Script Sep 21, 2018
Writing developed independently in three places independently: Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica, and China, but only alphabets developed from the Sumerians. This process of continuous abstraction from images was described in the Word Facts Video released today, but part of the reason that the symbols look more abstracted was because they were turned 90º. The reason for this was that it was originally written up-to-down, but to avoid smudging the clay, it was shifted right-to-left. However, while the scribes found this easier, those who had learned to read up-to-down struggled with this, and so the scribes simply wrote the letters sideways, to that both parties could work more efficiently.
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1379: 420 Sep 20, 2018
It is sometimes difficult to find accurate etymologies of new words and in particular slang terms; part of this is due to the fact that they are likely less studied by chance, but also many people will make up their own origins. Though not a word in the traditional sense, 420 is something for which people have ascribed many false origins, including that it related to a the police code for smoking marijuana, or that it was the number of strains etc.. The reason for the former and most prevalent faux-theory is that those who originated the term spread fliers through a few cities in Southern California as a way to get in touch with people to meet up and smoke gave that as the reasoning, but it goes back much further. In the early 1970's a group of high-schoolers would smoke after school at 4:20pm, and would use that term as a code to not get in trouble around other people.
1378: Business' Names Sep 19, 2018
Following off of yesterday's post, the principles that apply to the creation of new words also apply to companies. Traditionally, businesses were named after owners, or just say the name of the product with the name of the towns it was from, or another defining feature. When these stopped being so localized, the tendency was to shorten, either by abbreviating or initializing, or changing the name to something catchier, as to be more distinctive. As business shifted over to the internet and to apps, not only could fewer names be used, but shorter names that were easier to type were highly sought after to attract the most customers. Due in part to the scarcity of short names, and also to try to sound edgy, many startups would use variant spellings of ordinary words like Lyft™ from 'lift', or would simply make up words that were easy to remember. Context is significant in the history of names.
1377: i- Sep 18, 2018
1376: scapegoat Sep 17, 2018
There are plenty of terms that now are used in everyday language but when broken down make no sense. One such term is 'scapegoat', given that 'scape' doesn't have any independent meaning, and 'goat' seems like it could be almost a random term here. However, like with 'ostracize' the modern meaning can only be understood through history. In this case, in Leviticus it is described how a Jewish leader could banish a goat that had both literally and symbolically taken the sins of the people as a sort of replacement. Now, the idea of 'scapegoating' has less to do with sin, and relates more to blame for social or economic woes, but has ancient roots.
1375: primitive and primate Sep 16, 2018
Often, looking at patterns in suffixes and pronunciation thereof can lead to insights about words' histories. For instance, it is often the case that nouns and verbs such as 'graduate' have the same ending when written but are pronounced consistently differently, but in the rare case when this is not possible and there is only a verb, like with 'create', there will be an adjective 'creative' with '-ive'. Coincidentally, the noun 'primate' seems to have a correlate with 'primitive', but aside from the slightly different spelling, this is not much more than historical luck, as neither is a direct derivative of the other. Instead, they simply both come from the Latin 'primus' meaning 'first'.
1374: Postpositive Adjectives: Head Verbs
Generally, in English adjectives come before nouns, but there are exceptions, this is sometimes for pronouns, or simply specific adjectives like 'ago', but also this is sometimes from certain verbs. Linking verbs do this (e.g. 'funny' in 'the man is funny'), but other ones such as 'keep' or ones related to speech such as 'proclaimed' can allow for the adjective to follow, such as in 'the man keeps clean', or 'the psychiatrist proclaimed her patient sane', but 'he is a patient sane' on without the head verb doesn't make sense. If you have other examples, write a comment below.
1373: Discrimination from Accents Sep 14, 2018
1372: Abstraction from Pictographs Sep 14, 2018
All of the major writing systems began with images rather than letters. Even while there are a wide array of writing systems described here, all either originated from others or were originally abstracted from pictures. This was partly practical, since most writing was for simple commercial transactions, but also because the idea of representing words—which are already pretty abstract—by representing only the sounds with arbitrary symbols is not a quick logical step to make, as history has proven.
1371: hibernia and hibernation Sep 12, 2018
The following post comes from a fan question.
The word in Latin for 'Ireland' is 'Hibernia', still seen today in the combining form 'Hiberno-', and the word 'Hibernianism' (an Irish idiom), but this is not related to the word 'hibernate', or any other term related to winter such as 'hibernal'. Both of those sets of words do come from Latin, and while Ireland may be cold, 'Hibernia' is not originally Romantic. Originally it is from Celtic—not Irish Gaelic—from the word for a goddess 'Ériu' but the word only entered Latin via Greek 'Iverna'. This, in turn, has led certain people to claim that the Irish descended from or were slaves of Greeks. Whether or not this is true, the Latin 'hibernus' ('winter') is ultimately of romantic origin, and only coincidentally sounds similar. However, many Latin writers and ethnographers made puns out of this similarity.
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1370: Direction of Writing Sep 11, 2018
In the Western world, writing tends to be from left-to-right first, and then up-to-down, but when writing originated, it was up-to-down then right-to-left. All of this was due to the medium however, and the switches are not random. When writing was just beginning, it was primarily for keeping inventories, and so was written in a typical list-format still used today, and because tools needed to be pressed into clay, early writers—if the word even applies—would use the typically dominant hand. However, later on, to avoid smudging, the letters were rotated and written right-to-left to that impressions would not be smudged before they dried. Later on again, the Greek alphabet and all its descendants began to write from left-to-right to avoid further smudges as most people write with the right hand.
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