The Latin word “fossilis” means to dig up. You’re probably already thinking of the English word “fossil,” which came from “fossilis” for obvious reasons: fossils are dug up. But there’s another, much more obscure English word also derived from “fossilis”: refossion. “Refossion” is the act of digging up, and specifically the act of digging something up again, for the second time (or more times after that, I suppose).
The form of “refossion”, ending in “ion,” is a common way of turning an English verb into a noun. If a verb describes an act, then you add “ion” to talk about the “action” — because to talk about it as a “thing” (so to speak), you need a noun.
That business about turning words from verb into nouns comes from Latin, and it’s far from the only way you can do that in English. The simplest approach to using an English verb as a noun, of course, is just to go ahead and do it. You don’t have to ask, because your ask would be met with either a blank stare or a flat denial (notice that I just went ahead and used “ask” as a verb, then a noun, and didn’t ask anybody, even though using “ask” as a verb is pretty askinine).
When English speakers just “go ahead and do it,” using words in new or unexpected ways, that’s how the language grows and evolves. Not always, of course — a new word or usage has to catch on and be used widely to really enter the language. How widely is that? Nobody knows; it just happens. Or it doesn’t. There aren’t any rules.
That notion of “there aren’t any rules” isn’t entirely true, of course. English does “follow rules” — but not in the same sense as a language like French, where there are actual rules-makers. And that’s the key; English “rules” are made up after the fact. People interested in language observe how English is (for the most part) used and come up with rules to more or less describe it. In French the rules are more prescriptive, explaining how you’re “supposed” to use the language. English rules are used prescriptively by grammar police, but you can feel free to ignore them if you want.
It turns out that this aspect of English is just like railroads, where both kinds of rules can also be found. The “gauge” of a railroad is the distance between the parallel rails — for the railway to function, the gauge has to remain constant for all the tracks. And if you think about it carefully, there’s more to it than that: you also have to specify how the gauge is to be measured. In the US, where the railroad systems were based on those in England, there are two gauges: standard and narrow. Standard gauge tracks are 4 feet, 8 and 1/2 inches apart as measured at a point 5/8 of an inch below the top of the rail. This gauge comes from George Stephenson, who designed the first successful public railroad in England. Narrow gauge is three feet.
But the railroad system in the US was at one time much more like English, in a way. Around 1871 there were 23 different gauges in use in various parts of the country, from three feet to eight feet. There was even a railroad company called the “Great Broad Gauge Route”, which stretched from New York to St Louis, MO, with tracks six feet apart.
In England, an act of Parliament standardized the gauge throughout that country as early as 1846. In the US, the government was no help at all, so it took another 40 years for “standard” gauge to become (more or less) standard. But in English, try as the grammarians might, there’s no light from standards at the end of the tunnel. English may be the least fossilized language there is.
