When someone is seized by an intense romantic yearning — particularly when that someone happens to be a character in a romantic novel written around, say, 1885 — they might be described as “pining over” their wished-for paramour. That generally implies that they’re moping around, unable to do much of anything. If this state of affairs continues for too long, they’re “pining away.”
While you might think that “pining” has something to do with fir trees, you also might be completely wrong! The word “pine” meaning the tree comes from the Latin word “pinus,” which means resin — the sticky sap you get covered with if you do too much pining…er, no, that’s what you get if you do too much climbing pine trees. The other word “pine” meaning unrequited love comes from a different Latin word: “poena,” which means punishment. It’s also the root of both “penalty” and “pain.”
“Pain,” which today means “something that hurts”, didn’t originally have that meaning. At first — around the year 900 or so — “pain” mostly meant “punishment,” and it was “pine” that originally meant suffering. It wasn’t until the Normans invaded England and changed the language (but failed to upgrade the cooking) that the words began to take on the meanings they have today. You can still see an echo of the original usage of “pain” in the phrase “on pain of death;” it simply means “the punishment is death,” not “..and boy, is it gonna hurt!”
If you find yourself pining away over something, seemingly without the ability to change your behavior and alleviate the pain of pining, what you’re being is “sphexish.” “Sphex” is the ancient Greek word for “wasp”, and sure enough, “sphexish” behavior is based on something to do with wasps. Something very specific, as it turns out. Wasps — at least some variety of wasps — live in burrows and just like many birds, go out hunting for food and return home with whatever they’ve caught. What they do then, though, is unique. They leave the prey outside the entrance and go inside, apparently to make sure the grubs are okay. If they are, they emerge and drag the food inside. However, if for some reason the prey has disappeared — for example, if some meddling scientist moves it just to see what might happen — the wasp goes into a kind of “loop” where it repeats the cycle of going back inside, then reemerging to find the food. The wasp may continue repeating these steps indefinitely, as if it’s nothing more than a preprogrammed robot. Or, having come along well before any notable preprogrammed robots that come to mind, you might more accurately say that a preprogrammed robot is acting, well, sphexishly.
Although it’s based on an ancient root, “sphexish” is quite a recent word; it was coined by Douglas Hofstadter in 1982 in the column “Metamagical Themas” in Scientific American. He was making the point that humans do, sometimes, find themselves trapped in unthinking, repetitive behavior. Daniel Dennett, a philosopher, added “sphexishness” a couple of years later, and Hoftstadter then invented “antisphexishness” (free will) in a later book.
By the way, if “Metamagical Themas” sounds like a strange title for a column, it’s actually an anagram for “Mathematical Games.” Hofstadter took over writing the column when Martin Gardner, the longtime author of the column “Mathematical Games,” retired. Hofstadter named his new column in an homage to Gardner’s column, which was arguably the most popular part of the whole magazine.
And speaking of names created in homage to something else, the word “drone”, when used for an unmanned aircraft, is an homage of sorts. Some people think the word “drone” when applied to any sort of flying machine refers to the humming sound they make, but the real story is more interesting. The word “drone” seems to be Germanic in origin, and probably is an attempt to render the sound of a bee in a word (which would make it “onomatopoeic”, a word that everybody in the US is — or used to be — forced to learn around about sixth grade). Anyway, back in 1935 the de Havilland company created the first mass-produced, radio-controlled, unmanned airplane and named it the “Queen Bee.” Its more official designation was DH.82, and it was built to be a flying target used for practice. The word “drone” was adopted in the 1940s to refer to any unmanned flying machine that shared the basic idea of the DH.82. “Drone” comes from the name “Bee” in the name not anything about the sound it might have made.
