femtometre

According to Rachel Riley on BBC News this morning, it’s National Numeracy Day today. So I thought I’d find an interesting word to do with maths. I failed at this (not to say there aren’t any interesting maths words – just none of them interested me this morning. I have a very short attention span).

Obviously my next port of call for an idea was the box set I’m watching at the moment – a Danish drama on Netflix called ‘The Rain’. That took me to English words we get from Danish. And one of these is femto, a prefix in the metric system from the Danish word for 15, ‘femten’. A femtometre is equal to one quadrillionth of a meter (we got there eventually). Which is really freaking small. To put that into some kind of context, a proton has a diameter of roughly 1.6 femtometers. Like I said, they’re really freaking small.

shibboleth

According to the internet, it was World Password Day on 3 May (although their definition of ‘World’ seems to mean ‘American’). So, this got me thinking – when did the word ‘password’ come in to being? And is its etymology as simple as it looks? Well, it turns out it is, so I decided to not make that the word of the week. Instead, I went with a word I found while doing my (very short) research on ‘password’.

A shibboleth is a word, phrase, custom, etc, that’s only known to a certain group of people, so you can use it to prove you’re a real member of that group. Think Michael Fassbender in ‘Inglourious Basterds’ when he blows his cover as a German after using the wrong hand gesture.

You’ve probably guessed from the spelling, but shibboleth is a Hebrew word. It comes from the story of the Gileadites in the Hebrew Bible. They used the word to identify Ephraimites who couldn’t pronounce the ‘sh’ sound – so if they tried to say ‘shibboleth’ it came out wrong. I’m not sure what happened to them once they were identified, but I think it’s safe to say it wasn’t good.

anthropoglot

I worked out what last week’s word of the week was supposed to be! As mentioned last week, an anthropoglot is an animal with a tongue like a human, meaning it can mimic human speech (one dictionary I looked at said it was an ‘animal with a tongue like that of man’ which sounds gross, and a bit sexist). So, that’s parrots and that dog off the telly who can say ‘sausages’.

There’s more about anthropoglots, including an ELEPHANT THAT CAN SPEAK KOREAN, here.

dimorphous

The word of the week this week was going to be another one inspired by ‘The Chase’ (other daytime quiz shows are available). But unfortunately I spelled it wrong when I wrote it down, and now I can’t find it. I know it had something to do with animals that can mimic human speech. After several hours of internet research on parrots (apparently the African Grey is the number one talking bird), I still couldn’t find it. So I went with dimorphous instead, which came up a lot during said ill-fated parrot research.

Despite sounding like a super-villain from a Marvel comic, dimorphous is when something comes in two distinct forms. It’s mainly used in biology to describe species where the male and female look very different. Think ducks, lions and those weird fish where the female is 50 times bigger than the male. Ewww. Here’s a picture of the dimorphous eclectus parrot (the green one is male and the red one is female).

Oh, and if anyone saw that episode of ‘The Chase’ and knows what the word is (it definitely maybe started with ‘anthro’), please let me know.

Still, at least I’ve learned a lot about parrots today.

tubercle

Sometimes the word of the week is something topical, or something with interesting etymology. And sometimes, it’s just because it’s nice to say. That’s what I’ve gone with this week.

I heard tubercle on ‘The Chase’ the other day (for those of you who work 9 to 5, ’The Chase’ is an afternoon quiz show hosted by the super-giggly Bradley Walsh). A tubercle is basically a knobbly thing on a plant or animal. Specifically, that’s a protuberance at the top of a rib; various sticky-out things in the central nervous system, organs or on the skin; and finally, a lesion caused by tuberculosis. Well, I said it sounded nice, I didn’t say it meant something nice…

If you’re still reading, here are some videos of Bradley Walsh completely losing it on ‘The Chase’.

bugbear

When I was doing the word of the week last week, I used the word ‘bugbear’. And then I realised that I don’t actually know where the word ‘bugbear’ comes from. You know what it means: it’s a thing that’s annoying (although having looked it up in the dictionary, it actually means a thing that causes obsessive anxiety – so a thing that’s REALLY annoying). But the etymology itself is interesting (not an oxymoron).

A bugbear’s a mythological type of hobgoblin used by parents to frighten naughty children. The name comes from the Middle English word ‘bugge’ which means a frightening thing (there are also similar words in old Welsh and Scottish – ‘bwg’ and ‘bogill’), and it’s probably where the more well-known term ‘bogeyman’ comes from. In a 1565 Italian play called ‘The Buggbear’, it was a bear that lurked in the forest to frighten those poor kiddies again. Scary.

whence

Okay, so this one stems from a bugbear of mine (I know you’ll find this hard to believe, but I have one or two of these. By which I mean hundreds). If you’ve ever watched a fantasy film or TV show, you’ve probably heard a Gandalf-esque character yell something about sending some monster back ‘from whence it came’. But ‘whence’ actually means ‘from which’ or ‘from where’ – so they’re saying they’re going to send said monster back ‘from from where it came’. Which is just stupid.

Even bloody Elrond in Lord of the Rings (the movie) gets it wrong at the unimaginatively named Council of Elrond – ‘[The ring] must be taken deep into Mordor and cast back into the fiery chasm from whence it came’. For shame, Elrond. It’s the olde-worlde equivalent of saying ‘pin number’.

meme

Now, I thought memes were the remit of the young folks, and always preceded by the word ‘internet’. But the word itself has actually been around since 1976. It was coined by Richard Dawkins and refers to how ideas can spread from person to person by repetition and replication. So things like fairytales, jokes, rhymes, and so on, are in fact memes. Interesting, right? Here’s the bit of text from ‘The Selfish Gene’ where Dawkins coined it:

‘We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. “Mimeme” comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like “gene”. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to “memory”, or to the French word même.’

equinox

Despite the fact that lots of us, myself included, spent last weekend huddled round a log fire/radiator/bottle of whisky to escape the snow, it was officially the first day of spring yesterday. So this week’s word of the week is: equinox.

The equinox is when night and day last for the same amount of time. There are two a year, and Wikipedia tells me that it’s when the northern and southern hemispheres are equally illuminated (along with lots of other more complicated sciencey stuff). So that’s nice.

‘Equi’ means ‘equal’ and ‘nox’ means ‘night’ in Latin, which is weirdly logical for the English language. This one’s called the vernal equinox, vernal being from the Latin for spring, and the other one’s called the autumnal equinox which is, well, it’s just English isn’t it. There’s more on equinoxes here.

masculate

Nope, that’s not a typo (even though there’s lot of red underlining under it while I’m writing it). Masculate is exactly what you’re imagining – the opposite of emasculate. So it means to make something more masculine. You can also say that you’re masculinising something (which sounds made up but really isn't).

I came across this because I was investigating whether there’s a female equivalent of ‘emasculate’ (as in to deprive a man of his male role or identity, rather than the more literal definition of castration). Turns out there isn’t. *shakes fist at patriarchy*

skeletonise

Sometimes we just like words because of how they sound, and this is one of those. You can probably guess what it means – it’s the last stage of human decomposition when all the fleshy bits have gone (there are three others: autolysis, bloat (lovely) and active decay). Nice.

PS I don’t recommend a Google image search of this like I just accidentally did (especially not if you’re feeling a little bit delicate after the night before). Not nice.

blizzard

Definition: thing which is currently ruining all my lovely birthday plans. Boo.

planetesimal

As you’d expect, this means a small planet. But it also refers to the bits and bobs (that’s the technical term) which can come together to make up a planet. Apparently there’s a theory that that’s how the earth was formed. Called, rather unimaginatively, the planetesimal hypothesis, it states that planets form out of cosmic dust grains that collide then stick together to form larger bodies.

Etymology AND science? I know, spoil you.

gyves

This is an old word for manacles or fetters, and cropped up in a book I’m reading at the moment (no, not ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ – it’s a medieval murder mystery-type thing called ‘Beloved Poison’ by E.S. Thomson which my sister bought me purely because she liked the cover). A not-very-in-depth internet search tells me that ‘gyves’ possibly comes from the Welsh ‘gefyn’ for ‘fetter’ or ‘shackle’, or the Irish ‘geibbionn’ (‘fetters’) or ‘geimheal’ (‘fetter’, ‘chain’, ‘shackle’).

PS Had I remembered to post this yesterday, you would have got a nice fluffy, lovey-dovey word for Valentine’s Day. Although if you’re reading ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ then maybe manacles are your idea of romance...

gatecrash

This is American slang which seems to date back to the early 20th century. And that's all I got folks – the etymology is surprisingly hard to find. This leads me to think that it’s just what it says on the tin – that to enter an event without an invite you have to literally crash through the gate. Maybe?

booze

It’s FINALLY the end of January which means many people (not me) will be jumping back on the alcohol wagon after a month off (I had a drink last night). So the word of the week is in honour of this fact.

The etymology of ‘booze’ is actually quite hard to find. Disappointingly it doesn’t come from the name of a 19th-century American distiller, E.C. Booz (some nice nominative determinism there for you, folks). It looks like it first appeared way back in the 14th century as ‘bouse’ (also how I spell it after a few shandies), which possibly came from the Dutch word ‘búsen’ which means to drink excessively.

Go forth and get hangovers, my friends.

anarcho-syndicalism

This is in honour of Ursula K Le Guin who very sadly passed away this week. A central part of Le Guin’s novel ‘The Dispossessed’, this is a form of anarchism which is very complicated and far too difficult for me to give a full explanation of here because as per usual I’m very late doing this and I don’t have time to type it all (have a look at Wikipedia which explains it much better than I can).

Please come back next time, I promise it’ll be better.

portmanteau

As well as being a type of bag, a portmanteau is also a word made up of two other words, like ‘smog’ (smoke and fog) or ‘breathalyser’ (breath and analyser). It was Lewis Carroll who first used ‘portmanteau’ in this way. Here’s Humpty Dumpty in ‘Through the Looking Glass’:

‘Well, “slithy” means “lithe and slimy” ... You see it’s like a portmanteau – there are two meanings packed up into one word.’

Modern slang continues to embrace the portmanteau with words like ‘chillax’, ‘bromance’ and, a personal favourite, ‘craptacular’ (something that’s so crap it’s also spectacular).

Weirdly, and rather pleasingly (at least if you’re a wordy geek like me – maybe not so much if you’re a normal person), ‘portmanteau’ itself is a portmanteau. It's made up of ‘porter’, French for ‘to carry’ and ‘manteau’, also French for cloak. MIND. BLOWN.

scumbag

This was inspired by a documentary I’ve just watched on BBC 4 about the song ‘Fairytale of New York’ by the Pogues and Kirsty MacColl (well worth a look if you have the time).

In British slang scumbag just means a horrible person. But in US slang it means condom. Yep. It comes from ‘scum’ which is US slang for ‘semen’ and ‘bag’ which means, well, ‘bag’. So, there you go.

Happy Christmas.

ickle*

These days we use this to mean ‘little’ (as in ‘Who’s an ickle pickle?’ which I regularly ask my dog. Answer: it’s her). But it actually means ‘a frozen drop of water’. Which is where ‘icicle’ came from.

* Shamelessly stolen from Susie Dent’s Twitter feed. Except the bit about my dog. Susie Dent doesn't ask my dog if she’s an ickle pickle.