Words to live by

Every state has a motto. Some are in English, many are in Latin, and one is in Greek (California’s “Eureka,” or “I found it”). Oddly enough, Maryland’s is in Italian (“Fatti maschii, parole femine” for “strong deeds, gentle words”). The word “motto” itself comes from Italian, probably via French, and refers to a clever, witty saying. Connecticut’s motto is a bit cryptic, the Latin phrase “qui transtulit sustinet,” or “he who transplanted still sustains.” It is a reference to God watching over the colonists after they uprooted from their native land, and may have had its inspiration in the vines of Psalm 80. Only four of the state mottoes reference God (Arizona, Colorado, Kentucky and Connecticut). Curiously, the United States itself had no official motto until 1956′s “In God We Trust,” signed into law by President Eisenhower. The unofficial motto up until that time was “e pluribus unum,” or one (nation) from many (states).

Three states have two mottoes: South Carolina, North Dakota and Kentucky. The Latin phrase uttered by John Wilkes Booth after he shot Lincoln, “sic semper tyrannis” (thus always to tyrants) is the state motto of Virginia. Seven states have one-word mottoes, including our neighbors, Rhode Island (“hope”) and New York (“excelsior” or upward), and one motto was a song (Kentucky’s “United we stand, divided we fall”).

Ohio had no state motto for almost a hundred years, until a nine-year-old boy led a three-year campaign for the only state motto that directly quotes Scripture, “with God, all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26), adopted in 1959.

A fancy word for rain

When something causes or brings about something else, we say it precipitates the latter. However, when it rains, we also term it precipitation. What is the connection here?

Precipitate comes from a Latin root that means to fall or hasten. There is a sense of suddenness, force or severity. We can see from this why rain is termed precipitation,  as rain usually has a sense of suddenness about it and seems to fall from the sky with intensity (there is also a connection here to the word precipice). As for the “bringing about” meaning, this comes from the same sense of suddenness, but without the falling connotation.  If my calling the boss a moron precipitates my getting fired, there is the implication that my action hastened along the end result. And no, I’m not calling my boss a moron. Bad example. I hope he doesn’t read this.

Speaking of rain, why do we sometimes  say it’s “raining cats and dogs?” According to British linguist Gary Martin, it likely originated in a poem of Jonathan Swift’s (he of Gulliver’s Travels), wherein he describes rain so heavy that it washed drowned cats and dogs down the street. This is an allusion to the poor sanitation practices of the time, as Swift often criticized London society. In other words, the filthy street conditions precipitated the precipitation of felines and canines.

Word surprises

Were you ever certain that a word was pronounced or spelled a certain way, only to find out, with great surprise and after many years of error, that you were wrong all along? Three such words come to mind for me. The word barbiturate does indeed have a second “r” in it. Ever since I first heard the word in the early seventies, I was sure it was “barbituate.” Another word with a troublesome “r” that only recently enlightened me is infraction. An infraction is an offense that you might get a ticket for, like a traffic violation. However, people who have heart attacks do not have “myocardial infractions,” as I always thought. The correct term is “myocardial infarction.” Yes, it sounds funny to those of us not in the medical field, and it is totally unrelated to the word infraction. Lastly, when you are thankful for something you are grateful, not greatful.  While greatful would seem to make more sense, there is actually an obsolete word, grate, that means pleasing or acceptable, which is where grateful comes from.

Did any of those words surprise you, or were they just my special stumbling blocks? What are yours?

With apologies to Al Gore

The term “internet” has been around since the early to mid-seventies, even though the medium it eventually came to define didn’t enter the public consciousness until two decades later. The word was originally not capitalized as it should be now, and is shortened from “internetwork,” a reference to the interconnected computer networks that comprise what we now know as the Internet. The term is also thought to have gained popularity from frequent reference to “internet protocol” in the early days of networked computing, which defines how packets of data travel over the network (and, incidentally, is what the “i.p.” in your IP address stands for).

Other terms soon came on the scene that built off of the interconnected network symbolism, most notably the concept of the “web” that appeared in the early 1990s, and later the “website.” I don’t know if anyone else has used it before, but if not I’d like to coin a new term today: cobwebsite, to refer to a website that has not been updated in a while. Cute, huh?  (I just looked this up on the web – it appears I’m not the first!)

 

Those daffy, self-centered flowers

Daffodils were originally called affodills, which is a variation of the medieval Latin name for the flower, affodillus.  Nobody can seem to account for how the “d” came to be added to the front of the word, except that perhaps it sounded too good to resist. It may have derived from a kind of lazy spoken contraction when the name is preceded by the word “and,” such as in this sentence:  “In the field were many tulips and affodills.” What we now call “daffodils” are actually a flower that goes by the botanical name of narcissus. In Greek mythology, Narcissus was a beautiful youth who fell in love with his own reflection in the water. Not realizing it was his, he pined over himself to the point of death. The flower which bears his name is said to have sprung up where he died, and people who are self-centered are called narcissistic. The tale is in the Roman poet Ovid’s classic work, Metamorphoses.

The plural of the flower, incidentally, is narcissi. As for that early bloomer the crocus, both crocuses and croci are acceptable for the plural (but people will look at you funny if you say croci). Personally, I think the plural of daffodil should be daffodilli. It just sounds right.

The son also rises

Where did we get the word Easter? Almost every other Germanic language derives its word for the celebration of Christ’s resurrection from the Latin word for passover, pascha, such as Paques (French), Pasqua (Italian), Pascuas (Spanish), and Pascoa (Portuguese). Only German gives Easter a name similar to the English one: Ostern. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, our word for Easter is derived from the same base as the word east, as is also true in German. The reference here is to the part of the sky that the sun rises in. It is not hard to see the connection between this image of dawn and Christ’s resurrection. We can take this even further and note that the “sun rising” and the “son rising” are homophones, and this may have also contributed to the association of Easter with the dawn. This is even more plausible when you consider that the words for son and sun are not homophones in the languages that base their word for Easter off of pascha, but they are in English and German (sohn and sonne).

A bit of 10-43*

In the early days of police band radio, it took the transmitting device a fraction of a second to fully power up. This  would often result in the first word spoken being partially cut off if the user didn’t remember to pause first after pressing the button. To solve this problem, the attention word “ten” was spoken first, followed by a “ten code” that identified the nature of the transmission. The codes were created by a state police employee from Illinois district ten, from which they take their name. They were adopted by citizens band radio enthusiasts in the seventies, and made popular by police shows on television and the hit song “Convoy” in 1975. The official list of codes ranges from 10-0 (“caution”) to 10-99 (“wanted”), with the most recognized and widely used one being 10-4 (“acknowledged”). While many of the codes are still in wide use, regional variations in meaning have resulted in confusion, reducing their effectiveness. Also, radio technology long ago eliminated the loss of initial syllables, and it has been recommended in recent years that the codes be abandoned in favor of plain language. They did this with the” Convoy” song title, which could have been called “10-59″ (“convoy”).  But that never would have been a hit.

* 10-43 = “Information”