Pylimitics

Every once in a while the word “spelunking” shows up. It means “exploring caves,” which is something done by a “spelunker.” It seems pretty strange; there’s really nothing about crawling around inside caves that would suggest a word like “spelunking.”  The modern English word “spelunker” is relatively new; it appeared in the 1940s, and seems… Continue reading

You hear a lot these days about the “gig economy.” It’s the idea that fewer people can find traditional jobs where you have a particular employer who pays you a fairly predictable amount, so they find more temporary ways to earn money. These often involve acting as independent contractors instead of employees. In a “gig… Continue reading

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