Today’s Word of the Week actually came in as a special request…and I admit it’s a word I’ve always just shrugged off too. What, exactly, do people mean when they toss around postmodern or postmodernism in their conversations? Turns out, the word can mean different things depending on what it’s applied to…and hilariously, one of the strictest definitions is probably opposite what the speakers actually mean.

So to understand postmodernism we first have to look at modernism. We all know what modern means, of course. But modernism was actually coined by Jonathan Swift in a letter to fellow-writer Pope in 1737.

I wish you would give orders against the corruption of English by those scribblers who send us over [to Ireland] their trash in prose and verse, with abominable curtailings and quaint modernisms. [Swift to Pope, July 23, 1737]

What he means here as modernism is “a deviation from the classical manner,” in this case of writing. So modernism is the tossing out of convention and its rules and creating whatever you please.

Postmodernism, then? Here’s the funny part. In architecture, it means rejecting that modernism that eschews the classical rules and actually RETURNING to the classical form. But in literature (and philosophy in general), it instead takes it a step further. In postmodern thought, you’re not just rejecting the rules, you’re saying that there can objectively be no rules, because there’s no objective truth. Everything is subjective.

Where do you come down on classical vs. modern vs. postmodern? Me…I’m a classical girl through and through. 😉

My mom sent me this one, so of course I had to look into it! I found the explanation pretty quick, but nevertheless enlightening, so let’s take a look!

Smithereens dates from 1810 and has always meant “small fragments.” No surprise there. But where does it come from? This is the interesting part. =) The smither part we know–it’s directly from the Irish Gaelic smidirin, which is itself a diminutive of smiodar, which means “fragment.”

So what about that -een? Is that where the “small” comes from? Etymologists can only take a good guess at that part, but their theory is that the -een was indeed applied as another diminutive, quoting names such as “Colleen” as evidence that it was done frequently in the Gaelic language. In my imagination I can see someone looking at minuscule fragments and deciding it was so small, it wasn’t just a smither, but a smithereen. 😉

I looked up the word dunce during my marathon writing session for the final book in the Secrets of the Isles trilogy, just to make sure I hadn’t been using it for years when I shouldn’t have been (because those sneak in!), and I was fascinated at what I learned! It had certainly been around long enough for my 1906-set story, but I had no idea its history was so interesting. So naturally, I have to share.

Dunce is actually taken from the name of John Duns Scotus, and before it was dunce, it was actually Duns’ man. So who, you ask, is John Duns Scotus? He was a Scottish scholar of philosophy and theology who lived from 1265-1308 and whose followers ran the universities just before the Reformation. By the 1520s, people were lashing out against the medieval theology and “knowledge,” and John Duns Scotus had become their archetype for the academic who was so obstinately focused on minutia that they failed to see larger truths. By the 1570s, dunce meant “ignoramus, dullard, dolt,” especially dull-witted students. The dunce cap that we all recognize from historical classroom scenes dates from around 1792.

Whenever I come across a word like this taken from someone’s name, I always shudder. Something to avoid in life: that sort of legacy!

The other week at one of our tea parties, a guest asked me how my writing was going, and I said, “Oh, you know. Plugging away at it.”

My daughter, who always joins us for these parties, looked over at me like I was crazy and said, “Plugging? Seriously? That’s a phrase?”

Yes, dear. That’s a phrase. And I can prove it. 😉

Plug has been a verb since the 1620s, in the sense of filling a hole. But it’s carried the meaning of “to work energetically” from 1865. As of the turn of the twentieth century, it had also taken on the meaning of “popularize by repetition” (like advertisements plugging a new product everywhere you turn).

See, Xoe. Totally a phrase, LOL. And an apt description of the day-to-day schedule of getting up and doing what you love, even when you’re exhausted! 😉

Did you know that algebra and algorithm are not only related, but both derived from a (mangled) translation of a mathematician? Yep!

In the 9th century, a Baghdad scholar named Abu Ja’far Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi wrote a famous treatise on mathematics that introduced Arabic numbers and computing to the West for the first time. In honor of him, these ways of working with numbers were named after him…in a way. Medieval Latin used algorismus for this “system of computation,” which was their bad translation of al-Khwarizmi. Over the centuries, algorismus eventually became algorithm.

Similarly, algebra (also joining the language in the medieval days) was influenced by this same name, altered slightly to reflect the Arabic al jabra, which means “reunion of broken parts.” By the 1550s, it meant “formal mathematics; the analysis of equations.” It wasn’t until the 17th century that the pronunciation became AL-gebra; until then, it was the more Arabic-influenced al-GEB-ra.

How do you stand with algebra? Love it? Hate it?

My daughter asked me a few weeks ago why a last name is called a surname. I had no idea…but of course declared, “Word of the week!” and promptly looked it up. 😉

And it’s both straightforward and not. Sur is Latin for “above,” so the original meaning of surname was “an epithet, name, or title”–as in, something tacked on to one’s name. Think Catherine the Great or Sir William, Esquire. It began being used in that sense in the 1300s. But it only took about a hundred years for surname to be applied to family names instead of just titles or epithets.

I found it quite interesting to learn that family names came to the English world first among the Norman nobility in the 12th century. Commoners had begun to adopt the tradition a century later, but it began in the south of England and was slower to catch on in the north.

Do you know what your surname means or where it came from?