Pylimitics

You can get a pretty good idea of the functions of a language by examining its words. This is more than that old saw about “Eskimo having 27 words for ‘snow’”. That was probably apocryphal anyway, but I’m not just talking about nouns. The nouns in a language do, of course, give some insight into… Continue reading

A couple of thousand years ago — well, more than that really — the young people of Greece were notorious for wearing their hair quite long. There was even a Latin word for this: “acersecomes,” which simply meant “a long-haired youth.”  “Acersecomes” is Latin, but it comes from the Greek roots “kome” (hair, particularly the… Continue reading

Here are three interesting words you don’t see every day: “selmelier,” “panjandrum,” and “octothorpe.” The first is a protologism, but not the other two. Those used to be neologisms, but aren’t any more. A “protologism” is a word that somebody coins — maybe for a particular purpose, maybe in the hope that it will become… Continue reading

English borrows from every language it encounters. Most English words, of course, can be traced back to European languages, either from the south (think the ones related to Greek and Latin) or the north (Germanic). But English also has words that come from, of all languages, the Aztecs. This is a bit surprising because Aztec… Continue reading

English does some inconsistent tricks when it comes to numbers. After ten is “eleven” and “twelve”, but then a sequence of “-teens”. So why isn’t “eleven” called something like “oneteen” and twelve “twoteen”? You can find the first clue by checking out the various non-metric measurement systems used (also inconsistently) in English-speaking countries. One foot,… Continue reading

A “bozo,” as lots of people in the US know, is a person who’s not regarded as the most competent or capable of the bunch. Some of this comes from the character “Bozo the Clown.” Bozo was created in the 1940s as a character in a children’s book and a record album kids could listen… Continue reading