I recently saw a list of fun Colonial-era words that we should totally bring back into use.  One of them was savvy, which anyone who watched Pirates of the Caribbean can hear in Jack Sparrow’s voice.

Well, just for the record, Jack was totally using it appropriately. 😉

Savvy today usually means “practical sense, intelligence”–which has been around since 1785. Think “he’s tech-savvy.” But it is indeed also a verb, meaning “to know, to understand,” taken directly from French savoir-vous and/or Spanish sabe, both of which mean “you know.”

So this is really just an older way of tacking that dreaded “you know?” question onto the end of a sentence, savvy? 😉

A couple weeks ago, my husband said something about something costing “Ten Gs” and my mother-in-law said, “Where does that come from, anyway?”

Cue the chime of “Word of the week!” from my kids, LOL.

So obviously we knew that “G” was just short for grand. But why and when did grand start to mean a thousand?

I couldn’t find a a drawn out explanation, but what’s clear is that this slang emerged around 1915, and it was primarily used at the time in the shady side of life–etymonline.com calls it “underworld slang.” So this would have been used, strictly in the monetary sense, by thieves and mobsters and bookies and the like.

What’s also clear is that it comes directly from the adjective, which has long meant things like “large, powerful, chief, important.” Phrases like Grand Canyon and grand slam had already been well established in English, so grand already had the connotation of “the big one.” And since a thousand dollars would have been quite a lot of money back then, it certainly makes sense that it would be considered a grand amount.

I’m currently reading Siri Mitchell’s State of Lies for my book club (SO GOOD!!!!), in which the heroine is a quantum physicist. (Which her 6-yr-old son calls a fizziest, which made me giggle.) I’ve been thoroughly enjoying all the science jokes on her T-shirts, and her musings about things like black holes.

And I also thought it would fun to take a quick peek at the history of the word. Quantum is directly from Latin, meaning “as much as,” which them in turn came to be “one’s portion.” This word has always been there in Latin, but it wasn’t borrowed for scientific purposes until Max Planck decided to use it in 1900 for these small portions of energy. It was Einstein who then took up the word and made it part of our vernacular, beginning in 1905 when he used the word in his Theory of Relativity; and then in 1912 actually coined the phrase “quantum theory” and, in 1922, “quantum mechanics.”

I do find it rather entertaining that if you look up the word in Merriam-Webster, the noun version means “small increments or parcels,” but the adjective means “large, significant.” Hmm…not sure how that one happened!