Thursday, April 18, 2019

The Fascinating World of Words

"Compared to the drama of words, Hamlet is a light farce". said Anatoly Liberman.

Words indeed have hidden lives.  Not all of us take an interest in the many common and uncommon words we employ in our communication.   If we did care, what we are sure to discover is the fascinating world of words.

There is one man who has indeed taken this interest in words a different level altogether. His name is Anu Garg, an Indian born computer engineer settled in the USA. He started, in 1994, what the New York Times called "arguably the most welcomed, most enduring piece of daily mass e-mail in cyberspace"

Anu Garg sends out a simple email every day, A.Word.A.Day (AWAD), containing a word, its definition and etymology, and an example of its current contextual usage; this to more than a quarter million subscribers around the world. Incidentally, recently, on the 14th of March this service completed 25 years.

I have been a loyal subscriber to A Word A Day for a long time and there have been countless occasions when stories about some words have left me absolutely enthralled. For example, the word Window comes from Old Norse, the predecessor of English, in which it meant "wind's eye". How poetic, isn't it?

Garg organises words into themes. One week the featured words could be Eponyms, words that are derived from people's names (for example, shrapnel, after a British army officer). Another week it could be words borrowed from another language, such as Yiddish, or Sanskrit. Sometimes he provides words that have some interesting and unusual patterns. The word Facetious, for example, is a word with all five vowels, once and only once, and in order.

Any dictionary can provide you with a large collection of words. As the French novelist Anatole France called a dictionary "the universe in alphabetical order". What Mr Garg does through A Word A Day is to identify and present some of the more interesting words with their biographies.
That biography of a word- the story behind it is called etymology (from Greek etymos which means true).

Some people think that everyday words are enough as they are afraid that if they use an uncommon word the others may not understand. It's a Catch-22 situation.  Others don’t understand the words because the words are not used often. Garg suggests that we look at words as a color palette. You don’t have to use all the colors in a painting, but it helps to be able to use the right shade. There are some, like Dr Shashi Tharoor, who employ uncommon words in their writing and speech. This gives a certain vibrancy to their communication.

Anu Garg has also brought out a couple of books that contain a selection of some of the words appearing in A Word A Day. Let's look at some common words with their intetesting backgrounds. These have featured in the AWAD over the years and also in one Anu Garg's books - "The Dord, the Diglot, and an Avocado or Two".

PUPIL The two senses of this word, a student and the part in the center of the eye, are related. We got this word from the Latin pupus meaning a boy and pupa meaning a girl.
In the part in the center of the eye, even adults appear small like little children. And that’s why that part of the eye is called a pupil.

ADMIRAL What could the commander in chief of a fleet have in common with a Muslim ruler?  Admiral is another form of the word emir/amir, the title of the head of state in some Islamic countries. It came from amir al meaning “commander of”.

SYMPOSIUM Symposium was originally a “drinking party”. Drinking has a way of relaxing the tongue, and that idea grew into the current sense of symposium where people gather to engage in conversation on a topic.

TAXICAB A taxi is, well, one which taxes. It’s a shortened form of “taximeter”, which is the name of the device that calculates the fare.

TRAVEL The word travel comes from another word, travail, which means hard, painful work.

SALARY The word salary came to English from the Latin salarium, which means an allowance for salt. In olden times salt was expensive. So soldiers used to get rations of salt. The word came from the Latin “sal”, meaning”salt”.

POLITE When you’re polite, you are polished, from Latin polire (to polish).

GLAMOUR This word is another form of the word “grammar”. The magical charm sense of the word arose because grammar, or learning, used to be associated with the occult.

PLAGIARISM When one plagiarizes, one is kidnapping words of another, so to speak. The term comes from Latin “plagium” (kidnapping).

ENTHUSIASM Today, if someone is called enthusiastic, it’s seen as a compliment. But it wasn’t always like that. In the 1840s, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Everywhere the history of religion betrays a tendency to enthusiasm.” At that time, enthusiasm meant being possessed by God or a vain confidence of being divinely inspired. It’s from Greek theos (god).

NAUSEA If you’ve ever felt sick by the swaying motion of a boat, you’ve unknowingly experienced the origin of nausea. It came to English from the Greek word “naus”, meaning a ship. The motion of a ship causes many people to feel sick in the stomach. That’s why it’s also called motion sickness or seasickness.

The Webster’s dictionary contains some half a million words. The words that have featured in A Word A Day in the last 25 years exceeds 5000. So many great stories have been shared on words and the world of words never stops fascinating.  The words that have featured in AWAD have all been  archived at wordsmith.org. See my blog page (Word Resources) for a thematic arrangement of links to AWAD archives.

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