Word of the Week – Sophomore

Word of the Week – Sophomore

by | Oct 23, 2023 | Word of the Week

We know sophomore as “second”–second year of school, primarily, both high school and college…but it’s been extended to other “seconds” as well. One’s second book is called one’s sophomore work, and so on. That primary meaning has been in use in English since the 1680s, of university students.

But when you dig a little deeper into this word, you find a good laugh.

The word was originally sophume, which literally meant “arguer.” It traces it’s roots back to the Greek sophia, of course: “wisdom.” But more particularly, to sophist, which at its own root was supposed to be “a master of one’s craft, a wise or prudent man”…but which colloquially came to be seen as someone who argues a point, not much caring whether it’s right or not–they just want to win. They’ll say whatever sounds good. (There are quite a few ancient documents that delineate the difference between a sophist and a philosopher. By the time Plato wrote, sophist had a definite negative connotation among the learned.)

And that connotation was rather purposefully drawn into this English version, too. It was chosen for second year students because they tend to argue and think they’re right. Evidence for that can be seen by the variation from sophume to sophomore. That -mor is an appeal to “moron.” Yep. Sophomore is a deliberate mash-up of “wise and prudent” and “moron.”

I can laugh because I’ve been a sophomore twice in school and as a writer too, and boy, do I see the truth in that! 😉

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Word of the Week – Cyber

Word of the Week – Cyber

by | Oct 16, 2023 | Word of the Week

Today’s word comes to us courtesy of my daughter, who texted me after a class in college to ask, “Have you ever done cyber as a word of the week? Mr. Schulman was just telling us about it! Look it up!” So, having trained my whole family to be so word-of-the-week minded, how could I do anything but obey? 😉

Cyber.

To us today, this word-forming element, usually used as a prefix, means one thing: the internet. Cyber– is reserved for things that live online or promise access to what is online. But…why? Ever pause to think of where this word came from? You’re in for a surprise!

Cyber- was coined by a US mathematician, Norbert Weiner, in 1948. Yep, you read that right. Looooong before the internet as we know it, we had the word. And it was actually coined as cybernetics. I confess I didn’t actually know what that means, not precisely. But upon looking it up, I see that it means now what it was created to mean 80ish years ago: “the theory or study of communications and control.”

Okay. So, knowing that was the starting place, we can see how the internet became THE means of both communication and control.

But let’s trace it back a little further. Why did Weiner choose this word? Best guess is that he based it on the French word, cybernetique, which means “the art of governing.” Makes sense, right? The art of governing IS communication and control. But then, where did the French get the word?

As it turns out, it goes all the way back to Ancient Greek (as so much does). The Greek word is kybernetes and it means “steersman,” or, metaphorically, “a guide.”

So from someone who literally steers and then metaphorically guides, we get the art of steering and guiding a whole people–government. And from governing, we get the study of what allows to govern–communication and control. And from the the means by which we moderns do that so instantaneously, we get anything that has to do with advanced technology.

A quote from New York magazine in 1996 calls cyber “the perfect prefix. Because nobody has any idea what it means, it can be grafted onto any old word to make it seem new, cool — and therefore strange, spooky.”

Yyyyyep. I think we’ve seen that borne out!

 

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Word of the Week – Autumn (Revisit)

Word of the Week – Autumn (Revisit)

by | Oct 9, 2023 | Word of the Week

Originally posted October 3, 2011

It’s that time of year again. The leaves are turning colors, the weather is turning cooler, and the pumpkin vines are taking over my yard. Okay it’s the first year we’ve planted pumpkins, so this is a first–and a lesson to us on where NOT to plant them next year! LOL.

So it seems like a fine time to talk about the roots of the words we associate with the season. =)

For a good while, British folk referred to this time of year solely as “harvest.” It wasn’t until the 16th century that the word “autumn” entered the vernacular. Taken from Old French and, in turn, Latin, there are also suggestions that it shares a root with August, and that the aug- implies severity.

Over the centuries, most “autumn” words have come to carry a meaning of “end, end of summer” or “harvest.” And unlike all the other seasons, we not only have several words for it, we also have several different start/stop dates in English speaking countries. In Britain, for example, autumn begins in August, while in America it’s September.

And of course, from “autumn” we get one of my all-time favorite words: autumnal (pronounced aw-TUHM-nl), which my best friend still swears I made up. 😉 As you can assume, it means “things pertaining to autumn.”

And then, of course, we have “fall.” Now used only in the U.S. as a synonym for the season, “fall” is short for “fall of the leaf,” and dates from the 1540s. So it’s nearly as old as “autumn,” but has for some reason fallen out of use (ha . . . ha . . . ha . . .) in other English-speaking parts of the word.

So here’s wishing everyone a beautiful, colorful fall filled with all the delightful, autumnal things that make you smile. =)

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Word of the Week – Barbarian

Word of the Week – Barbarian

by | Oct 2, 2023 | Word of the Week

When we call someone a barbarian, it has some definite tones of insult going on. But was it always that way? I remember reading in school about how really, the word was just from Barber, a foreign land to the Greeks and Romans.

And that’s true…but.

But even in the days of Ancient Greece, there was still a note of insult in barbarian–it not only meant “foreign,” it meant “foreign, incomprehensible, ignorant.” Even the Greeks considered those who didn’t speak their language or understand their ways to be inferior. Less so in truly ancient days, but after the Greco-Persian war–Persians being the ultimate barbarians to them–there was DEFINITELY negative connotations

Interestingly, Romans were considered barbarians to the Greeks as well…but then when Rome conquered Greece, adopted the word, and began to apply it to other areas. It’s traveled down through the centuries from there, arriving in English in the 1400s. It was used throughout the Middle Ages for pagans, foreigners, and especially those from the Barbary Coast. By 1610 it was used for any “rude, wild person,” but was still considered a step closer to civilized than savage.

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Word of the Week – Banana

Word of the Week – Banana

by | Sep 25, 2023 | Word of the Week

Banana.

There’s something about those duplicated syllables and vowels that just makes it a fun word to say, am I right? But also a little strange. Where did this word even come from??

I was expecting some interesting etymology to match the fruit’s interesting history, but it’s a bit mysterious. What we know is that the fruit was introduced to Africa in pre-history, and that West African dialects called the fruit–you guessed it–banana. We know that Spanish and/or Portuguese explorers kept the name for the word when they began transporting the fruit to Europe in the 1510s, and that English speakers were using the same name for it in the 1590s. Why did those original people call it that? Big ol’ shrug.

But there are some interesting pieces on the various phrases using banana that are fun.

First, its casing. Banana-skin came first, in 1851, and was followed with banana-peel in 1874. Here’s the funny thing–you know all those TV or cartoon episodes with people slipping on banana peels? Real thing! People really did leave the peels on the streets, and as they rotted they got slippery and resulted in falls. It was a huge nuisance in cities…and even an insurance scam in the 1890s that targeted streetcar lines! Who knew?

The wonderful invention of a banana split brightened humanity’s existence by 1901 (I’m not biased, LOL). Banana oil was used for the chemical “essence of banana” (kinda like extract) by 1873 but by 1910 was also used to mean “nonsense.” In the 1950s, banana began to be used as a word for a comedian, which is probably what led to bananas as a term for “crazy” in the 1960s.

But let’s hop back to that extract or artificial flavoring for a few “did you know?”s. Did you know that banana flavoring was one of the very first artificial flavors? And while we today think of that flavor as “fake banana,” it’s in fact true banana–the flavor was made to imitate bananas of the time. Since then, banana trees have been modified and all been cloned from a single source–that’s why every banana tastes the same (and why when disease hits the trees it’s potentially catastrophic!). So our bananas today are actually just a derivative of original bananas, and that “fake” flavor is really “historically accurate banana.” 😉

And what about banana republics? This was a term used to refer to the Central American countries whose economies were entirely dependent on banana cultivation, which was a very big deal in the early 1900s. Rich American and British entrepreneurs set up plantations that ended up more or less controlling whole countries by being the only revenue source around. Sketchy. And it’s also why bananas are one of the core fruits today.

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Word of the Week – Ambivalence

Word of the Week – Ambivalence

by | Sep 18, 2023 | Word of the Week

Did you know that ambivalence was coined as psychological term?

It was based on the word equivalence, which is comprised of two Latin roots, equi (equal) and valentia (strength)–which of course means that two things are of equal strength. Well, in 1910, Swiss psychologist Eugen Bleuler wanted a word to mean that two things conflicted with each other in someone’s desires, so based on that well-established word, he took the Latin ambi (both, on both sides) and paired it with valentia.

Of course, this Swiss doctor spoke German, so his term was actually Ambivalenz, but within two years, English speakers had picked it up as ambivalency and were using to indicate “simultaneously conflicting feelings.” It had been shortened to its current form by 1924…and by 1929, the purely psychological term had been taken up by the general populace and applied in both literary and general senses.

I had no idea this word was so new! How about you?

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