< return to the brandensite

running commentary

The internet is filled with things. Here are some of them.

#language

2025

Bette Midler is a Hoss 2025 Jan 30
No, really, it says so on the big wiki, saying she "was voted 'Most Talkative' in the 1961 school Hoss Election." This bold claim is referenced to my opening link, which now only exists in the waybackie. Although whether the archived page claims such is uncertain; images did not survive the archival process and only text persists. Midler is (in text) listed as being on the 1961 school newspaper staff, if that matters to you Bette aficionados.

But me and this lost Hawaiian WRX enthusiast in 2004 both want to know, what in the high hell is a hoss?

Midler grew up and went to school on Oahu, Hawaii, and while the islanders mix a good amount of Hawaiian language into their daily lives, the word hoss doesn't sound very Hawaiian to me. And yet, some quick a-searchin reveals that whatever a 'hoss election' is, it definitely is an island thing. In 2007, columnist for the Honolulu Advertiser Lee Cataluna ran a couple color articles on this topic. On June 24, 2007 she realized "that hoss is an exclusively Hawai'i phenomenon" defining them as beginning at least by the 1960s: "We all get the concept. Most high schools in Hawai'i have them at the end of the school year. You know, Best Dressed, Most Athletic, Cutest Smile, Most Likely to Succeed ..." before asking her readers, "Somebody has to know. What is a hoss election, anyway?"

A month later, Aug 26, 2007 she gets her answer when Larry and Henriette Valdez share their 1959 yearbook photo as winners under the banner "Horse Elections." She quotes Larry as saying, "Prior to 1960, it was a 'Horse' Election ... a blue ribbon for First Place, Red for Second Place, Yellow for Third Place. We only had Blue Ribbon categories for Most Likely to Succeed, Best Looking, Best Dressed, Best School Spirit, Most Athletic, Most Talented and Most Comical."

But is that correct? Hoss and horse kinda sound similar, especially if you talk with a cowboy accent or a fan of 1959's Bonanza, that old Western TV show where Dan Blocker played rancher Eric "Hoss" Cartwright, a large-but-friendly main character.

The internet abounds with various groups' hoss election results, but few of them delve into the origin of the term. I think it may be best summed up on this beautiful Angelfire page from 2003 (complete with an actual MARQUEE tag, omg I love it) for Kauai Community College's Filipino social club's "HOSS Elections" where they state: "No one knows for sure what HOSS really stands for or what it means."
What does "shoddy" have to do with antisemitism? 2025 Jan 29
The Online Etymology Dictionary provides a decent overview of how the word shoddy evolved from a factory term meaning "cloth made of woolen waste and old rags" (perhaps related to shed) to its modern definition "having a delusive appearance of high quality." The material was originally used for padding, but then developed into a "commercial cheat" fabric for making cheap clothes, notoriously used in the manufacture of "army and navy cloths in and blankets" for the Union in the US Civil War. "The citizen-soldier's experience with it in the war, and the fortunes made on it by contractors, thrust the word into sudden prominence," the dictionary summarizes without mentioning any Jewish connection.

They then expand on this by providing this longer quote of a passage from Henry Morford, "The Days of Shoddy: A Novel of the Great Rebellion in 1861," published in Philadelphia in 1863:
The Days of Shoddy, as the reader will readily anticipate, are the opening months of the present war, at which time the opprobrious name first came into general use as a designation for swindling and humbug of every character; and nothing more need be said to indicate the scope of this novel.
But unfortunately that's not the whole story, as I've discovered reading author Steven R. Weisman in his 2018 book The Chosen Wars: How Judaism Became an American Religion. On page 148 in the chapter Anti-Semitism in the North and South he writes:
On the Union side, anti-Jewish prejudice flared over the role of Jews in businesses that profited from the war, often featured in news stories and cartoons depicting Jews as avaricious, disloyal, and greedy. These focused especially on poorly made uniforms made from shredded or discarded fiber known as “shoddy.” Shoddy became an anti-Semitic slur, so widespread was the assumption that it was Jews who produced such goods. “In the media, the theme of ‘shoddy,’ the purported manipulation of financial institutions, the alleged subversive complicity with the Confederacy, the supposed exploitation of military personnel by Jewish camp followers, and the claims of foreign intervention against the interest of the North continued unabated to plague the image of Jews,” the historians Gary L. Bunker and John J. Appel write.
Ewige Blumenkraft 2025 Jan 29
Illuminatus! is one of my favorite books, featuring a narrative held together by duct tape and twine but absolutely brimming with cleverness throughout. In my mind it's the conspiracy version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, with a similar wit and observational awareness shared equally between the two.

Ewige Blumenkraft ("eternal flowerpower") is, according to Illuminatus!, the first half of the passphrase for the Illuminati, ending und ewige Schlangenkraft ("and eternal snakepower"). References are layered on top of each other, alluding to hippies, sexual symbolism, and occult motifs. Blumenkraft is also the name of Ott's first LP, an acid trip into pure psychedelia.
Antidisestablishmentarianism 2025 Jan 11
When I was a kid, my mother told me the longest English word is antidisestablishmentarianism. She didn't tell me what it meant, because that didn't matter to her, and if she told me where she herself learned this factoid, I've long since forgotten. My mother loved trivia for trivia's sake.

The word is weird enough that it actually has two different pages on the big wiki, one explaining the word itself and one for what is represents: opposing the separation of church and state. But as some other anonymous wikipedian once wrote on the page for the longest word in English, "The identity of the longest word in English depends on the definition of 'word' and of length," and, being wikipedia, the page's first entry is some chemical nomenclature 189,819 letters long and comes with the helpful note "whether this should actually be considered a word is disputed." Well, no shit. There's a lot of weird technical and nonsense words contending to be longest on the list, because language nerds are like that, but down the page, it is pointed out that the longest non-weird words a person is likely to encounter are "deinstitutionalization and counterrevolutionaries, with 22 letters each" (although I can't help but notice my browser's spell check balks at the former).

So what's the deal with antidisestablishmentarianism, why did my mother know this random word? I can only guess, but this 2009 Old Time Radio Bulletin post has a clue:
Gloria Lockerman first appeared on The $64,000 Question on August 17, 1955. The nation sat enthralled as the 12-year-old [black] schoolgirl from Baltimore spelled “antidisestablishmentarianism” correctly on America’s most popular TV quiz show. On the morning after Gloria got the spelling correct, “antidisestablishmentarianism” was the most-uttered word in every office, factory and playground in the United States. ...

In 1987, the Free-Lance Star printed a where-are-they-now type article on Gloria Lockerman. The article related: “...There was a slightly racist aspect to people’s fascination with her: This was before the civil rights movement gained momentum, and Gloria Lockerman was black. Her brilliance was in direct contrast to many Americans’ stereotypes of black people, and there is no question that in countless living rooms, amazement was expressed not only that a girl of her age could spell the word, but that a girl of her color could do it. ... The other fascinating thing is the aforementioned racial angle. Many a newspaper sentence began, 'Gloria, a Negro...'"
(The blog post also contains an amazing 1955 letter-to-the-editor angry about the racist coverage of Lockerman.) Her fifteen minutes of fame may now be forgotten, but evidence of it remains, such as it inspiring The $99,000 Answer, an episode of hit sitcom The Honeymooners. Fresh off her win, Lockerman was invited to nightclubs (um, she was 12?), to state fairs, made an honorary teacher in her home town, and was featured in news reels which would have ran before movie films which played at the cinema motion theater houses. There's a hint she was questioned during the congressional investigations into quiz show scandals which ended up killing the genre by 1958 and boosting Ralph Fiennes' career forty years later.

Lockerman even appeared in a bit on The Martha Raye Show, an apparently popular variety show I've never heard of before (some quick searching shows that Martha Raye, aka Maggie liked to feature "regular people" as guests). Martha Raye's show would be canned shortly after by its irate sponsors when Raye and another white co-star kissed Lockerman, with the follow-up episode featuring a sketch where Raye appeared to get drunk... oh the horror! But Gloria's TV fame was only taking off, with her having appeared on screen 14 different times in the four months after her debut. Like happens, after such overexposure, Lockerman soon faded from interest, and by age 45, a Chicago Tribune reporter searching for her wrote in 1987:
She explained to me that there is nothing she values more than her privacy. She gained so much fame in 1955 that, long ago, she decided it was enough fame for a lifetime. In that summer of ’55 she went from being a shy, brilliant student to an object of the country’s collective curiosity-both because she was so smart at such a young age and because the fact that she was black went against many Americans’ backward stereotypes of the intellectual capacities of black people during that era.


All this antidisestablishmentarianismism was going on in 1955 when my mother was only one year old, a touch too young to be absorbing pop culture. But not too young for her three older siblings, nor for her similarly fascinated-by-trivia father (my grandfather). My mother and grandfather are both sadly passed, but her siblings are very much still here, and might enjoy me poking around into the nonsense of their youth, so I'll have to ask next time I see one of them. But whether they remember Lockerman and her quiz show appearance or not, it seems clear that the rise of American interest in the oddly long word from the political history of England, antidisestablishmentarianism, if not it's meaning, definitely stems from this moment in pop culture.

2024

Esperanto has 1,000 native speakers? 2024 Dec 17
In light of Zamenhof Day (two days ago, whoops), the wiki page for the constructed language Esperanto's creator, L. L. Zamenhof, claims the language has an estimated 1,000 native speakers. It does? Really?

The wiki cites sources, as it should, giving us two. The first is Ethnologue, a group which studies all languages, and which contrarily makes no claim towards there being any native speakers of Esperanto. Huh.

The second wiki source listed, though, is an article on the online language school Babbel's website called What Is Esperanto, And Who Speaks It? The article text is as you'd expect from the headline, and includes this quote: "And even though Esperanto was made to be an auxiliary language, there is a cohort of about 1,000 people who speak Esperanto as their first language, a few of whom were interviewed in the video above." The 'video above' is six minutes of casual interviews with ten-ish people entirely in Esperanto (and with no subtitles, in any language), so whether these people are native speakers and if so, how they came to be, is not possible for me to determine.

The next line of the Babbel article claims, "The most famous native speaker is Hungarian-American billionaire philanthropist George Soros, whose father was a devotee of the language." George Soros is a Jewish banker, liberal political donor, and conspiracy magnet, but he is also the son of Tivador Soros, an Esperanto author who changed his family name from Schwartz to Soros supposedly because of the Esperanto meaning will soar (or maybe he just was a fan of palindromes). But the Soros family was very much living in Hungary, and even if Tivador did teach his children Esperanto at a young age, surely they must have primarily used Hungarian in their day-to-day life, right?

This 2016 article from Tablet with a title referencing George Soros and Esperanto claims that while the invented language has an active and thriving community, it has no native speakers: "It’s probably better to spend your time learning Lithuanian or Tamil, which, unlike Esperanto, stand at the center of a living culture, with native speakers and a literary tradition." And later, "Esperanto was never supposed to be a native tongue, but rather an adaptable second language that would form a bridge between foreign speakers." But what about George Soros? Here, the article contradicts itself: "One currently world-famous Jew is that rarest of birds, a denaskulo (native speaker of Esperanto): George Soros." That and a few sentences following is his only mention in the article, although it does go on to mention an "Esperantist refuge called Bona Espero in rural Brazil." There, presumably, children could be raised speaking Esperanto natively... unless "the children prefer to speak Portuguese rather than Esperanto." [Aside: the article's worth a read for its detailing of the complicated relationship between Zamenhof, Esperanto, Judaism, and Zionism.]

In 2010, the New York Times says about George Soros: "He also recounted what it was like growing up in Budapest in the 1930s and ’40s in a home where Esperanto was spoken, making him one of the few native speakers in the room, if not the planet." But this contradicted by a Transparent Language Esperanto Blog 2011 post by (founder of the Esperanto-language wikipedia) Chuck Smith where the word "native" is crossed out in the quote "George Soros is the wealthiest native Esperanto speaker." Smith, in an interview with Esperanto advocate Humphrey Tonkin, prompts Tonkin into saying: "George Soros is not a native Esperanto speaker. Esperantists have made that claim on numerous occasions (it’s all over the Internet), but it’s simply not true. Soros learned Esperanto from his father when he was growing up, but his native language (his only native language) was Hungarian." (Tonkin also disputes that the name Soros was picked with its Esperanto meaning in mind.) But What Tonkin says makes sense, growing up learning a language even from childhood is not the same as being a native speaker. A native speaker of a language is a term without precise definition but connotes the person's mother tongue – the language in which they think.

Unreferenced on the Zamenhof wiki page is another wiki page, called Native Esperanto Speakers. While explicitly stating George Soros is not a native Esperanto speaker, it lists only five claimed native speakers by name, all notable people. First is Daniel Bovet, who won the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine for his discovery of antihistamines. His wiki page claims he's a native Esperanto speaker (sourced to fellow tertiary source NNDB, which itself cites no sources) while neither his biographies at the Nobel Prize nor the Royal Society even mention the language. He also once claimed that tobacco increases its user's intelligence, so, um...

Second is Petr Ginz, a novelist and teenage Holocaust victim whose diary was published posthumously. While he was the son of Esperantists and fluent in the language, his novels and diary were written in Czech, arguing against him being a true native Esperanto speaker. Third is Carlo Minnaja, a mathematician and author of the Esperanto-Italian dictionary. While undoubtedly fluent at a young age, being that by the time he was 20 he was on the board of the World Esperanto Youth Organization, I can find no further claim that he is a native speaker.

But then we have people who may actually be the real deal. Kim J. Henriksen's claim is strong since he has had said about him by American linguist and Klingon-speaker Arika Okrent that he "appeared not to appreciate how bizarre it was to be a native speaker of an invented language. Esperanto was the medium of his parents' relationship and of the entire home life of their family." She then adds, "Before you start getting indignant on his behalf, know that growing up he had plenty of contact with the world outside his home and learned to speak Danish as a native too. But he considered Esperanto his true mother tongue. For Kimo, Esperanto was a completely normal fact of life in the same way that Polish would have been if both of his parents had been Polish."

And lastly we have Ino Kolbe, an author and proof-reader of the Esperanto-German dictionary. The wiki says "Her parents were so dedicated to the Esperanto movement that the only language they used around her was Esperanto; therefore before entering school she learned her German only from other children," and that she grew up in a hotbed of Esperantism and at a time when even the League of Nations was considering the language's use in its General Assembly. (The source is a German newspaper; the link is dead but presumably trustworthy.)

So are there really 1,000 native speakers of Esperanto out there in the world, as the original statement claims? Are there 1,000 people who were raised by dedicated, diehard Esperantists, speaking the constructed language in their households and utopian villages? The existence of at least three scholarly papers would seem to argue towards this claim's substance, each being a study of native speakers of the language. The 2001 study by Benjamin K. Bergen of the UC Berkeley Linguistics Department of eight native speakers claims to be the first ever (investigating the 'nativization' of Esperanto), even though the 1996 study by Renato Corsetti, an Esperantist, (in Italian and Esperanto) documents 350 families with Esperanto-speaking children, saying the closest linguistic parallel seems to be the Hebrew revival. The 2005 study, again by Corsetti and now joined by Maria A. Pinto and Maria Tolomeo, traces development of Esperanto-speaking children but points out that they all have "two or three mother-tongues."

Let's end this long, pointless, rambling entry by linking to another Transparent Language Esperanto Blog post, this one from 2013 and titled 3rd gen native Esperanto speaker: Nicole! Here, Chuck Smith says, "Some people don’t believe that native Esperanto speakers exist." Yes, this is true. And while the article is updated with the face-palm correction that she's actually only a 2nd-generation native speaker, a native speaker she is. Nicole when asked about it says, "Well, I can’t compare that to what my life would’ve been like as a non-native Esperanto speaker, of course. However, it wasn’t annoying at all, and often it was nice to have a 'secret' language. It’s difficult to describe, but it was part of the family and somehow always felt 'nice.'"
Dangling prepositions 2024 Dec 17
Whether or not it is grammatically correct to end an English sentence with a preposition is a topic on the verge of becoming cliche, yet even in the year of our lard 2024 when monsignors Merriam, Webster, et al attempted to inform the public of this via the Insta, they were met with fierce backlash, refusal, and denial. This Grammar Underground article reminds these backlash-icans that they are, once again, wrong.
malarkey's cousin, ackamarackus 2024 Dec 3
A note on the etymology entry for malarkey reads: "Another slang term meaning much the same thing at about the same time in U.S. was ackamarackus (1934)."

That word's not in my regular dictionary. But there are lots of dictionaries online, so linked is a definition and some quotes of it in usage from Green's Dictionary of Slang (Jonathon Green is an Oxford-educated lexicographer). He says the word comes from pig latin (although I'm not sure how, exactly) and means "a fraudulent tale, a tall story, nonsense; usu. in phr. old ackamarackus."
The etymology of "smack dab" is uknown 2024 Dec 3
Nobody knows the origins of the phrase smack dab. Although its usage is primarily American and dates to the late 1800s and clearly relates to the adverbial use of the word smack, how dab got involved is as-of-yet unknown. Searching the web returns many people asking but receiving no answers.
Etymological Twins: Boulevard and Bulwark 2024 Nov 21
One of the neat things you find in etymology (nerd alert, obviously) is when a foreign word enters the English language multiple times, each successive borrowing taking on a new meaning in English. This is called "etymological twins," a sub-type of linguistic doublets. Famous examples of etymological twins include the words chief and chef, host and guest, hotel and hostel, warranty and guarantee, goal and jail. These twin words can drift in both form and meaning, sometimes to the point where the pair becomes quite obscure, such as in entire and integer. The linked ThoughtCo blog post collects excerpts from language experts on how these twins come to be, and other forms of doublets as well. There are lists online of course of etymological twins, such as (as you'd expect) the big wiki, but those lists are not exhaustive.

So it's fun when you stumble across twins new to yourself, as I did today, with bulwark and boulevard. Both come via the Middle Dutch word bolwerc meaning "wall of a fortification," although obviously it is boulevard that has drifted further in both form and meaning. For how we got there, I'll let the Online Etymology Dictionary do the honors:
originally "top surface of a military rampart" (15c.), from a garbled attempt to adopt Middle Dutch bolwerc "wall of a fortification" into French, which at that time lacked a -w- in its alphabet.

The notion is of a promenade atop demolished city walls, which would be wider than the old streets. Originally in English with conscious echoes of Paris; in U.S., since 1929, used of multi-lane limited-access urban highways.
New Mexico is not named after the country of Mexico 2024 Oct 27
They probably teach you this if you go to school in New Mexico, but somehow this information is new to me. "New Mexico" predates the country of Mexico by several hundred years.
New Mexico received its name long before the present-day country of Mexico won independence from Spain and adopted that name in 1821. The name "Mexico" derives from Nahuatl and originally referred to the heartland of the Mexica, the rulers of the Aztec Empire, in the Valley of Mexico. Following their conquest of the Aztecs in the early 16th century, the Spanish began exploring what is now the Southwestern United States calling it Nuevo México. In 1581, the Chamuscado and Rodríguez Expedition named the region north of the Rio Grande San Felipe del Nuevo México. The Spaniards had hoped to find wealthy indigenous cultures similar to the Mexica. The indigenous cultures of New Mexico, however, proved to be unrelated to the Mexica and lacking in riches, but the name persisted.
Lebenskünstler 2024 Oct 25
A Flickr contact of mine has his job description listed as Lebenskünstler which my extremely rudimentary German was enough that I saw "life" and "art" in there, but could make no more sense of the word. Internet translation automata rendered it in English as bon vivant. Which... believe it or not, is actually French, not English. And is also a phrase I cannot define. M-W to the rescue:
In French, the phrase literally means “good liver.” ... a bon vivant is one who lives well. English speakers have used bon vivant since the late 17th century to refer specifically to those who subscribe to a particular kind of good living—one that involves lots of social engagements and the enjoyment of fancy food and drink.
But I also found the linked blog post, which disagrees with that translation of Lebenskünstler. It is an article specifically about the inherent difficulty in translating Lebenskünstler into English, quoting the juicy bit here:
A Lebenskünstler is a person that manages to deal with problems in life in a positive and artful way. They have mastered the Lebenskunst (art of living). This is a very philosophical term, which was already developed in Roman times (ars vivendi in Latin). But in short, it means that by self-awareness and self-reflection, you manage to understand yourself and manage with any and every situation in life.
Is there no English word for that? The author suggests hedonism, a word coming from the Greek word for pleasure, but which now fully means "self-indulgent." Hedonism carries too much negative connotation for me to accept it as a translation for Lebenskünstler.

We strike gold in the article's comments, though, where someone attempts the word Pollyanna. Yet another word I don't know the meaning of. Resorting once again to M-W, a Pollyanna is "a person characterized by irrepressible optimism and a tendency to find good in everything." This word comes from the title character of a 1913 children's book. From Wikipedia:
Pollyanna's philosophy of life centers on what she calls "The Glad Game", an optimistic and positive attitude she learned from her father. The game consists of finding something to be glad about in every situation, no matter how bleak it may be.
Curiously, the dictionary always capitalizes Pollyanna but Wikipedia does not. A mark of this word's recent entry into our language, perhaps.

This comment is meandering enough already, but I feel compelled to also throw into the mix the word epicurean, not as a translation of lebenskünstler, but as a properly English alternative to bon vivant. Coming from the philosophy of Epicurus, the word has drifted over the years (and lost its capitalization) to now have the definition: "one with sensitive and discriminating tastes especially in food or wine."
The word epicure is currently associated with indulging the appetite, but that is a long way from the teachings of the man to whom we owe the word. The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus taught a philosophy of simple pleasure, friendship, and a secluded life. He believed in the pursuit of pleasure, but pleasure for him equated with tranquility and freedom from pain—not the indulgence of the senses. However, detractors of Epicurus in his own time and later reduced his notions of pleasure to material and sensual gratification. When epicure entered English in the 16th century, the philosophy of Epicurus had been trivialized, and so the word became synonymous with “hedonist.” Later use carried the notion of refinement of palate that we see in the word today.
Relating all this above language trivia will be sure to make you an instant hit at parties and soirées. Indulge me one last excerpt:
As is typical for words that have been borrowed from modern French, soiree in English signifies the fancy version of a simple “party”: an evening event that is formal or refined in some way.
Memes of our Forefathers: The College Widow 2024 Oct 23
While browsing the Etymology Dictionary, as one does, at the end of the entry for college comes the note "College-widow is attested by 1878." What the heck is a college-widow?

Enter Sadie Stein on this The Paris Review article:
Now, there’s a term you don’t hear anymore! The “college widow”! Once a byword for a predatory vamp, the college widow is an extinct American species.

I’ve read various definitions of the college-widow meme, which appears regularly in books and films from the first half of the twentieth century, and was de rigueur in any discussion of campus life. In some cases, these characters were portrayed as literal widows—young women who’d known the marriage bed and were hungry for young collegiate flesh. But more often, the term seems to have applied to a townie—or grad; at any rate, a woman hanging around—who dated men in successive senior classes, and were subsequently “widowed” with each passing graduation.
The rest of the article is worth reading, too, especially this pull from the now-defunct blog Paper Pop:
Filmmakers had to assure us that our heroes were healthy, red-blooded American men, who would never resort to all that Brideshead Revisited stuff that was rumored to go on at many an all-male campus. Obviously in the 1910s–1940s (the heyday of this trope), prostitution couldn’t be depicted on screen, so our protagonists couldn’t get their kicks that way. Once the Hays Code came into effect, adulterers must be punished. And for a hero to seduce an unmarried young woman would be caddish. So the college widow served as an effective outlet for all of our heroes’ wants and needs (and those of the writer): it proved the protagonist was straight, sexually desirous and desirable, and yet still a gentleman. Of course, the trope began to be played for laughs even more often than it was played straight, in movies like Horse Feathers [Marx Brothers' parody of this meme]. With the rise of co-education and the fall of the production code, the college widow found herself expelled from campus in favor of flirtatious co-eds.
I should've known sexism was involved.
Appendicitis Mountain 2024 Oct 14
Journeying my way around Google Maps, as one does, I did a double-take when I stumbled across a mountain in Idaho with an unlikely name: Appendicitis.

Well, as this link describes, that's what happens when the government surveyor sent to measure the mountains gets struck by a sudden case of Appendicitis while out surveying. The surveyor, Bannon, survived thanks to a local doctor, and and its been Appendicitis Mountain ever since.
Refried beans are only fried once 2024 Sep 27
This is doubtless common knowledge to any of the hundreds of millions of people who make refried beans, so I'm a little embarrassed I'm only learning this now, but "refried" beans are only fried once. The "refried" In the name comes from a mistranslation of the Spanish word "refrito." "Refrito" uses the prefix "re-" which unlike English, in Spanish doesn't mean "twice" but "very" – meaning the actual translation is "well fried beans."

Still tasty as all get-out, though.
SP Crater 2024 Aug 6
Why is there a crater in Arizona named "SP"? Isn't that a strange name for a Volcano? Why, yes, it is.

Quoth the Volcano Adventure Guide from 2005:
It is located on private ranch land and was named by the original owner, C.J. Babbit, in the 1880s. He was not, alas, as poetic as [the man who named the similar-looking Sunset Crater]. The bowl-shaped crater and the black spatter on the rim reminded this earthly person of a pot of excrement, and the name stuck. Mapmakers couldn't bring themselves to spell out the name, so it became "SP" – probably the only volcano in the world to be called after a rude acronym.
"Shit Pot". "SP" stands for "Shit Pot."
Why are complex things "Byzantine"? 2024 Jul 30
It seems rude that the most lasting legacy of the eastern half of the Roman empire is that the word we use to describe them also means "frustratingly complex." How did this word 'Byzantine' come to mean this? Was racism involved? Racism was involved, wasn't it?

According to this article, though the word "byzantine" didn't enter common usage until the 1960s, even Napoleon warned his people not to become preoccupied with "petty quarrels" like the court of the Byzantine emperor, so I guess it's fair to say that the Byzantine empire's reputation for busying itself with inefficiencies, well-earned or otherwise, has if nothing else been enduring.
NUTS! 2024 Jul 9
The story of, in World War II at the battle of Bastogne, Brigadier General Anthony C. McAuliffe responded to a German demand to surrender with the very short message, "Nuts!"
Let's do it 2024 Jun 26
There's a town in the timber country of far northern California called "Loleta." Why name a town after a Nabokov book about a ... you know? Well, it's not. That book wasn't published until 1955, whereas this town was named in 1893. However, the name is still bad. Because it turns out that... well, read it direct from the source (Ellen Golla, in a 2007 letter to the editor of Humboldt County's Times-Standard):
"In 1893, the residents of what was then known as Swauger's Station decided to change the town's name. Mrs. Rufus F. Herrick consulted a Wiyot elder to find an appropriate indigenous appellation. The Indians actually called it katawólo 't.

A joke was played on Mrs. Herrick. The elderly gentleman told her that it was hó wiwItak. This does not translate as 'beautiful place at the end of the river,' but rather 'Let's have intercourse!'

She interpreted the last part of the phrase, in baby-talk fashion, as Loleta. And thus she suggested 'Loleta' to the residents of the town, which they accepted."
Thugee: Monsters of Orientalism 2024 Jun 2
The word "thug" famously comes from the Sanskrit word "thag" due to the reports of "thuggee" – tribes of organized highway bandits in India which would steal and murder from unsuspecting travelers. But how much of this is true, and how much of it it simply Western Orientalism projected onto India and reinforced through lurid tales? This paper in Nature puts forth the argument that since most accounts of thuggee come not from Indian sources but from British, that the thugs in question likely didn't ever exist at all.
Pallet vs. Palate vs. Palette 2024 May 14
Due to poor life choices I find my vocabulary frequently includes the words "pallet" (as in those shipping things) and "palette" (as in what painters use) but that I also frequently confuse the spelling between the two. Throw "palate" (the roof of your mouth, or also your sense of taste) into the mix and wtf is going on here? Monsignors Merriam and/or Webster as usual come to the rescue.
Table of irregular verbs 2024 Apr 13
I love verbs which reach their various tenses through irregular means. They're great.
Compounding our Modifiers 2024 Apr 8
Why do we sometimes hyphenate between two otherwise normal words? The hyphen shows up when two words are used together in a single thought to modify the noun which follows them. This well-researched article from the American Copy Editors Society from 2005 dives through the whole story and its sources.
Rule of Adjective Order 2024 Mar 7
An English grammar rule that's so ingrained it escapes even the notice of school curriculum is the rule of adjective ordering. In the article's words,
multiple adjectives are always ranked accordingly: opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose. Unlike many laws of grammar or syntax, this one is virtually inviolable, even in informal speech. You simply can’t say My Greek Fat Big Wedding, or leather walking brown boots.
Etymology Online Dictionary in a Red Letter Media video 2024 Mar 5
My worlds are colliding... apparently in the original Mr. Plinkett Red Letter Media Star Wars Phantom Menace review that went viral a few years back and sent me on a spiral of watching thousands of hours of their other reviews, one of the "stock" photos they used happens to be a photo of the office of Douglas Harper, the creator of my much-beloved and daily resource Online Etymology Dictionary. This is nuts. Coincidence? Or does RLM also love Etymonline?
What is the letter "i" doing in the word "fruit"? 2024 Feb 23
My kid is learning to read and write, and the extra letter "i" in the word "fruit" threw her off. I jumped into explain, and then realized I couldn't. The trusty Online Etymology Dictionary tells us fruit comes from the Latin "fructus" by way of Old French, by which point it's already picked up the "i", but goes no further than this. So why did the "i" in "fruit" linger when so many other French-originating words have their spelling drift? Enter this short Stack Exchange thread, where someone throws a bunch of random words with "ui" into a jumbled question (the words "sluice" and "bruise" do contain the digraph "ui", the words "ruin" and "suicide" (like the word "fruition") clearly do not). The solitary answer doesn't address the word "fruit" – but it does contain a key.

The English digraph "ui" originally represented the "long u" (aka /juː/) – a sound like the "u" in "university" or "rebuke". But because of gradual phonetic changes in the language, the /juː/ sound, when coming after certain consonants including /r/, gets reduced to sounding nearly identical to "long oo" (aka /uː/) as in "truce" or "loop". So now "ui" becomes an uncommon but accepted way to make this /uː/ sound, and when an English speaker confronts the French-spelled word "fruit" they are not confused as how to pronounce it. If ambiguity from the "ui" did exist, the spelling would likely have adapted over time. But it has not, and so English retains the "i" in "fruit".

I am not a language expert; there's a good chance I'm wrong. But maybe I'm not.
Why Name a Street After Locusts? 2024 Feb 14
The linked blog post from 2012 asks the same question that I had – why are so many streets named "Locust"? Locusts, after all, are gross vermin, and streets tend to named after desirable things or presidents or people's names. Frustratingly, though the blog post links to an answer, that answer is now missing due to internet rot. However, this 2006 newspaper article from Centralia (wherever the hell that is) contains what is likely the answer to my question: "Despite the joke that Locust referred to the destructive swarming insect, the street's name is in reference to the tree species, as are most streets in the area." And that not only makes sense, but it's so obvious I'm wondering why I couldn't come up with that answer on my own.
zero 2024 Jan 27
What does it really mean to "invent" the number zero? Why is its invention so special – so critical to science? And how rare was its invention? DRH once again has all the answers.

2023

What is the origin of the word "weeaboo"? 2023 Nov 15
Perry Bible Fellowship and a 4chan word filter conspire to forever change the English language.
The numbers 1-10 in 4500 different languages 2023 Oct 30
How many languages aren't here? Well, there's almost 5000 living languages listed in Ruhlen's volume; I have numbers for about 83% of them, so there's at least a thousand more. (If the math doesn't seem to work out, note that I have plenty of dialects and conlangs not included in Ruhlen's list.) There are about 200 languages with more than a million speakers, all of which are in the list.
Mojibake 2023 Oct 26
Apparently messed up character encoding is so prominent in Japan that there's a word for it. What a world we've made.
Is this the most powerful word in the English language? 2023 Oct 16
Similar to the previous, this BBC article jumps into the word "the" and how critical it is to our language, but how it's precise definition is less a critical aspect of the word than it's grammatical function.
How India changed the English language 2023 Oct 16
I consider myself an armchair enthusiast of etymology – always looking words up to see where they came from. But this article from the BBC, put out in 2015 to promote the new edition of a 1886 book Hobson-Jobson: The Definitive Glossary of British India (a "classic work of Victorian scholarship" according to Oxford University Press, the publisher), delves into many word histories that spring from parts the world I'd never suspected.
Omniglot 2023 Sep 1
This "encyclopedia of writing systems and languages" contains a wealth of fascinating information and details not available even on Wikipedia. Why do Basque writers make the top strokes of the character "A" longer than others? Why does Fraktur exist? What even is an alphabet? This site has it all!
Blond vs. Blonde: What's The Difference? 2023 Jun 22
Is English a gendered language? It certainly used to be, but maybe there's more vestigial bits of unnecessary gender left buried in our language than at first appears. This article from 2019 discusses one of the more subtle instances, and the trends leaving these differences to the past.
Eleventy-one 2023 Apr 26
Was Bilbo Baggins just being clever when he so described his 111th birthday as his "eleventy-first"? JRR Tolkien was too much an etymologist for me to believe there was nothing more there, and turns out my suspicion is correct.
Steaming a Good Ham 2023 Mar 20
In which we learn how one can truly translate text into Shakespearean English.