Writing about writing

Way before paper was invented, we had papyrus (a thick writing surface made from a papyrus plant); and even before that we had vellum, made of calfskin (which it literally means). What has remained, as was intended, is writing.

In Latin, we have “scribe” as its root. So anything written down, simply becomes a script, or informally, a scribble. When you take a good top-to-bottom look at something, you describe (or colonize, if you’re into that). The act of copying down a piece of writing, converting it from one medium to another, becomes transcribing.  In the good ol’ days (of any time before 2016) you could sign at the bottom of the paper and give your name for a magazine or pamphlet to be delivered to you periodically. This is called subscribing. You can also click at the bottom of the video and be notified of the creator’s periodic uploads. Sometimes, you need a written direction before you can get your hands on something, such instructions are called prescriptions. You get the general idea.

As usual, we have its counterpart in Ancient Greek in “-graph”. And as usual it was adopted better by the science department leaving the rest of us with the Latin one. Any instrument used to take “readings” is a -graph (or an -inator if you’re being truthful). The difference between “meters” and “graphs” is entirely pedantic, and depends on usage. So a sphygmograph later became a sphygmomanometer as it was adopted by the English doctors and “meters” is derived from Middle English “mete” which means “to measure”.

Whatever you receive in written form from these machine becomes a “-gram”. So you have sonograms, cardiograms, etc. Something which quickly shares sharing such “grams” therefore is Instagram, and if you become insta-famous people will get in lines to add something written by you in your own handwriting (or your autograph) to their collection. The rock from which you get the stuff to write with (a pencil) perhaps, is graphite. But you can write with lights, great you’re a photographer; you write beautifully, you’re a calligrapher; and so on.

Thought for food

Sparing a thought for food, possibly the most common words that come to mind are elementary. Carnivore, piscivore, omnivore, the lot. The common root amongst them is “-vore” which in Latin, loosely means, “eat” depending upon the form of the word. If you get creative with the root, you can make words like voracious or voracity (which represent greediness) and devour (“de” means down, so when you eat something bottom-up, or eagerly, you devour). Other than that, the root falls loose but you can use to create a food out of anything, from gold in aurivorous, to cutlery in cultrivorous.

It’s counterpart in Ancient Greek is more common in the medicinal and zoological world, as “-phagia”. It’s different forms, as with other roots, would be “phagy” (pertaining to an act), “-phage” (to a person), or “-phagic” (to a condition). So a person who has difficulty eating or swallowing, would be suffering from dysphagia, and would be dysphagic. If they lose the ability completely, they’d be aphagic.

If you eat a lot, you become hyperphagic; and if you do, you suffer from an insatiable love for food and are phagomanic. If you are rich and want to preserve your soul and bones by getting all of your flesh eaten off, consider buying a sarcophagus; and if that doesn’t work out, then sucks to be you because we’re increasingly running out of toilet paper.

Walking with dead

Books gave immortality a bad name, and video games redeemed it. The main root in the word comes from Latin, “mors”, and it means “death”. So you have the standard words like mortuary, mortician (an actor of death, so an undertaker) and mortality spawning off of it. Over time though, it also came to be associated with fear; so you have mortify (or being excessively frightened or embarrassed almost as if a fear of death ran through you) and morbid (or frightful, almost as if “characterized by death”). Other than that, if your portal gun-carrying, alcoholic grandfather forces you to come on deathly adventures with him, “mort” also makes for a good name in Morty; or Voldemort when you want to escape death until you’re killed by the Master of Death (“vol” is flight in French).

The other common root for death comes from the usual suspect Ancient Greek, in “necr-“. And it makes up all the disgusting words like necrophilia (being accused of which is still better than being accused of animal cruelty). If you write obituaries and obituary notices, as in George Lucas for Star Wars, then you’re a necrographer (I seriously believe that word has much more potential though). 

If you study the dead you’re a necrologist. We also get necrophobia, and the slightly religious, slightly demonic (as is the case with things usually), necrophagia or “the practise of feeding on corpses”. There are better things to eat though, and there are important lessons in that thought, lest you cause a pandemic.

Potter, please, no more cannon

The name Ted has its own fun story.  Most famously, President Theodore Roosevelt, who was all for forests, avoiding fights and still getting all the fish, got a bear toy fashioned out of his likeness, which was then baptized by early capitalism as “Teddy”. This is called an eponym; or “named upon”, usually a place, person or thing. That’s why an age can be Elizabethan, Orwellian, and if you’re really feeling the pretentiousness, Ultronic. There are companies named after the founders’ names, and random scientific constants, consistently and suspiciously named after German scientists.

Not just nouns, you can be queer enough to spawn an entire characteristic to be named upon you. If you are idealistic to the point of impracticality, you can call yourself Will McAvoy. Or settle for “quixotic” like others, after Don Quixote de la Mancha. You can also misuse this to make up fun inside jokes about your friends just be wary of friends like Britta britta’ing the use of “Britta’d”.

It’s rather surprising when you actually take a step back to see the sheer number of words which are eponymous; sometimes really just some terms which our ancestors used to make fun of their contemporaries. Sideburns was an American general who had burns of facial hair on his sides; dunce was named after a Saint whose rivals took a revenge on him; and what about kids named Jazz, and Carlos and Karen?

Having said that, as fun as it is being objectified, one really needs to ask, as is with every other way of gaining immortality: “is it really worth it?”

Why fear of a person who loves a child's feet covered with mud is valid, but pedopaedopedophilliacophobia is not

Sometimes the confusion between two or more similar words is merely etymological. An example of such can be the common roots for “soil”, “feet” and “child”; and the difference between pedology, pedal, and pediatrician.

The root for “soil” is derived from Ancient Greek, “ped” giving us words like pedology, or study of soil; and pedogenesis, the process of formation of soil.

For feet, the “ped” comes from Latin. Therefore the words referring to “feet” are usually made with other Latin suffixes and prefixes. Words like bipedal, tripod, millipede, pedal, pedestrian, and pedometer (or a machine for counting steps) all refer to feet. Expedite is made of “ex-“ or out, plus “ped”. So if you outpace something, you “expedite” it.  

The root word for “child” , thanks to Merriam Webster, is not child’s play anymore. In Ancient Greek, the root is spelt as “paed”. The Americans got it as “ped” and therefore we have pediatrician, instead of paediatrician; paedophile became pedophile causing confusion between earthworms and other kinds of creeps; and paedagogue became pedagogue (though no teacher ever taught that). 

So when Ted Mosby rants about “encyclopedia” being actually “encycloPAEdia”, his agitation is well directed for a book which was supposed to include “everything around the subjects a child may require” is indeed an encyclopaedia. Looking at you Merriam Webster.

Other word for word

Since “logos” can also mean “words”, logic, it turns out, is very reasonably termed to mean “to reason with words”. Now logic can be transposed on to a lot of things. When you use it to shorten calculations, you get logarithms. When you make a blog centred around words, it’s logocentric, and you have to be careful not to get carried away; that condition would be logorrhea (yes, you may now take that suffix, “rhoia” which means “flow”, and make many more disgusting words). 

The words you saw in an attempt to move “away” from your previous words or actions becomes an apology. A word, when it comes to represent a whole becomes a logogram. Like how “-ology: derived from logos now means “a study of”. So a study of words, then by tautology and logic, becomes logology.

In fact, “ology” has become so logogramous that you can get the scientific term of most branches of studies by simply adding “ology” at the end of the root word of that particular field of study. And that’s how etymology, the “ology” of “etym” aka “origin”, becomes important.

There’s one more reason why etymology is important though. It helps you distinguish between children, mud, and feet, which is easier seen than said.

Why cookie monster eats a lot of cookies

There are two very common roots which mean “to speak”; guessably, one from Latin, the other from Ancient Greek. In Latin, it’s “loqui” or “-locut”. And it’s fairly prevalent. The art of speaking therefore becomes elocution. An informal talk therefore becomes “colloquialism”. If you speak a lot, you are loquacious. If you speak through the belly of another, you are a ventriloquist (“venter” means belly). And when you ask a politician a question they may practise circumlocution. Or talking around something, not really getting to the point. If you continue with this study of words, you may also call people out on their pretentious grandiloquence. In fact, this root is where we get terms like “lectern”, even Latin for law as “lex”, as it was the word to be followed.  

The other is an even commoner root in Ancient Greek, “-logue” from “logos”. It means “word” or a discourse. So a discourse between two people becomes a dialogue. One with oneself becomes a monologue. An additional discourse before and after the topic therefore respectively becomes prologue and epilogue. This blog itself, logically, if it documents a stroll we’re taking, becomes a travelogue.

The beauty of sleep

The common root for sleep comes from the Ancient Greek, “somn-“. “Somn” itself may be traced to the Sanskrit root of “swapn” which also means dream. And honestly if you’ve made it till here on this microblog then you do have insomnia (“in” is a Greek root denoting “opposite”, so finite’s is infinite, definite’s is indefinite and so on). However, if you’ve been actually sleeping throughout this little stroll then you’re a somnambulist. “Ambul-“ is Greek for walking (so if you take a stroll around words, you’re circumambulating).

If you’re still sleepy then you’re somnolent, or suffer from somnolence if you’re sleepy pretty much all the time. And if you’re still able to answer questions in class in such a condition then you’re practising somniloquy. Otherwise known as “damn, that’s crazy.”

How to escape the Matrix

Continuing beyond meta, we get “morph”. Morph- is again a Greek root which means shape, or form. It has since been picked up by scientists to mean anything related with shape. When there are many shapes of a being, it’s called a polymorph, and the study of such shapes may be called morphology. If you find a fruit which looks strangely like a person and is now your president, then that fruit is anthropomorphic (or in the form of a human). If you see three teenagers spontaneously change into primary coloured dresses as they begin to introduce themselves to you for no apparent reason, then you just saw them morphing into Power Rangers.  

If you want to give shape to your thoughts, you have to be a dreamer. The god of sleep and dreams is therefore Morpheus. It is from him that we get the name of a drug that induces sleep: morphine. He later also dreamed up the Matrix, and had poor Neo do his bidding. This raises a legit question though: did Morpheus really wear those glasses the entire trilogy to hide he was sleeping and was actually sleep-talking the whole time?

Kafkaesque: how it came to mean what you want it to mean

The process of transforming is either called metamorphosis or “Autobots, roll out!”. Out of those, the lesser iconic “metamorphosis” can be broken down into three distinct Greek roots; “meta” meaning “beyond or change”, plus “morph” meaning “shape”, and “-osis” for “process”. It’s therefore literally, the process of taking a shape beyond one’s current one.

When you move beyond physics, you go in the realm of metaphysics, or more commonly known as taking arts. More commonly still, change in one’s body due to whatever we throw down our food-pipe is metabolism (“bole” means throw in Greek, this is possibly where we get the word “ball” from). Due to its somewhat transcendental meaning, literally, it came to be associated with anything so. A joke about the joke is a metajoke. Data about data is metadata.  

While the word alone is of Kafkesque proportions, it’s when you break it up that one may see enormous potential of words one can get out of the roots making up that one term. Calling it metametamorphosis might not be too wrong then?

How to not be spoilt for choice

The Greeks have had a fair influence on how we speak and perceive speech today. We can also thank them for writing some of the first recipe books for rhetorical speech and spicing up communication. There were too many cooks, and Plato’s Man may indeed be spoiled, but I love what they cooked up anyway.

It’s easy to imagine Athens choked full of pontifical middle-aged men who called themselves “philosophers”. It comes from the Greek “phil” or love + “soph” or wisdom. “Soph” eventually came to be associated with anything that involved cunning, knowledge and confusion, as should be fitting. A sophomore is someone who needs more knowledge because they’re still in their second year of college (If it seems like a poor joke, then it’s probably true); Sophie’s Choice is so because it’s a difficult choice between equally well-suited options, which is often solved by an internal monologue of sophistry (or the art of speaking wisdom). Those who practise sophistry need to do it with sophistication.

Sophists utilize rhetoric. And the Greeks played hopscotch with it. The art of speaking, or manipulation, or being a jerk, was broken down into elements which made up rhetoric. Everything from the conception to the presentation of an idea is rhetoric. There’s a reason why “It’s Bond. James Bond” is better than “My name is James Bond” and “I like you, and I want to date you” is worth billions less than “I’ve got a blank space baby, and I’ll write your name”. You can always transform into something better.

Of Gods and Supermen

The word “God” is either derived from Old English, or in a divine accident of unintended punning, from Gothic “gott” which probably means “to invoke”. Yes, it’s origin is uncertain, and unverified.

More interestingly though, “God” has two rather common roots in Ancient Greek and Latin. In Greek, the root is “theo-“, and we get a lot of commonly used and relevant terms from it. A country run by religious leaders is a theocracy, an Instagram post on the etymology of the word is theocentric, and brownies that are so good that they’re heavenly are theobromic (“-brom” in Greek is literally food).

The King of Greek Gods is Zeus, and when the Romans pillaged their way through the Pantheon they picked up Zeus and pronounced it “Deus”. And that became Latin root for God, or “deity”. So if you find “dei” or “deux” written along with a bunch of other words, it’s probably got to do something with God. For example, “opus dei” is God’s work. Mozart was godly because his middle name was literally Amadeus (amare + deus or love + God).

If you’re being beat up by Batman and suddenly you decide to shout “MARTHA!” and boom everything is cool again, then you just employed a “deus ex machina”, or “God from a machine”. The phrase comes from Greek theatre where in a play, to solve a seemingly unsolvable problem, the author would introduce a plot device (usually God lowered down onto stage using a mechanism) which would solve the problem. And scene.

Righteousness of left-handedness

Was Dexter smart because he was called Dexter or was he called Dexter because he was smart?

Dexter is formed of two Latin roots “dex” which means “right” and “-ter” meaning “of direction”. So if you are right-handed, you are dexter, and won’t be burned at stake for being possessed by the Devil. You see, the ancients considered doing things with one’s right hand to be the right, or godly way of doing things. If you were rebellious and were lucky enough to not be deemed a heretic you could go about practising the ways of the Devil, but you’d be called “sinister”. It comes from Latin “sinister” meaning “of left-handed” and is the opposite of dexter. Over time, “sinister” came to be wholly associated with anything deceptive, or evil.

Since the right and the left of it is mostly associated with one’s hands, “dexter” also eventually came to be associated with “hands” and therefore skilfulness. If you are adept at doing something, you’re dextrous. If you’re adept at doing that thing with both of your hands, you’re ambidextrous and you have something in common with Leonardo da Vinci. Even science adopted the terms “dexter” and “sinister” to distinguish between two objects which are mirror images of each other (like enantiomers, optically opposite isomers, sea shells, etc.).

All this is where the notion of performing every pious activity with your right hand comes from. It begs one to ask a question though: Is God not dextrous enough to be ambidextrous (or tri- and quart- in some cases)?

Is the Moon made of cheese?

While on the moon, don’t forget to try the stuff it is made of: cheese.

This bizarre notion comes from a Servian folklore in which a simpleton is made to believe that the reflection of the moon in the river is made of greene (it has no relation to the colour, it merely means “new” or “unripened”) cheese.

The notion has since found mention in John Keynes’s General Theory, DuckTales, NASA even released images of the moon made of greene cheese (so what if it was on April 1, 2002). Google Moon actually used swiss cheese patterns for zoomed images of moon, before high-res images were a common feature.

Cheese although is one of those words which has an unknown origin. Maybe it came from Italian “cacio” or Spanish “queso” or maybe it came from Latin, “casein or caesus” which is a protein which causes milk to coagulate. Or maybe from the French “fromage” meaning moulded.

And that’s the lesson here. Sometimes no matter how bad you want two things to relate and make sense, they just don’t. Even homonyms like “cheesy” meaning cheap is unrelated to cheese as we know it. It was picked up by British soldiers in India from the Urdu “cheez or chiz” which simply meant “a thing or something showy”. Language, like humans, can be complex. But unlike “human problems”, as showed Dexter, a linguistic conundrum is rarely solved by chanting “omelette du fromage”.

Different sides of the Moon

If reaching for the stars means champagne for you then let’s just agree we’re settling for the moon. But that isn’t all that bad. The moon has been associated with everything from purity, to mystery, to madness.

The word “moon” itself is derived from Old English “mona” (any tracings to the Mona Lisa is still a mystery to be solved, as is everything with that painting). Contemporarily though, it’s often seen in two forms: first, its Greek root, “selene”, derived from the Greek Titan  personifying the celestial body. She stood for grace and love (those 172 million followers of Selena Gomez suddenly make sense now). The Old Titan gave us words like selenophile (lover of moon), selenian (related to the moon) and Selenium (element named after the moon).

The second is the Latin root, “luna”, from the Roman goddess of the Moon. Some people start to see the faces of their lovers in the moon. Some also think that the phases of the moon affect a woman’s periods. Science calls them lunatics. But that’s still not a bad thing, keep that up and you just might get a gig with the Looney Tunes. If not, maybe you’ll get inspired to write a random Instagram post about it.

Starry starry night

As far as celebrating pauses go, you can either create a sad Instagram post out of them, or if you listen to a Benedictine Monk Perignon, you can use the time to taste the stars. He was talking about having champagne. The word itself is derived from French “champagne” which literally means sparkling wine from the Champagne region. Or countryside. But you never know when wine becomes a full-fledged war (or you do, I’m not judging).

The countryside aspect was over time picked up by the armies because of all the work they did in the countryside. Like digging up trenches, setting up tents and not finding any good place to “do their business”. That’s where we get the word “campaign”. Overtime it became more and more associated with battles, and armies and when this simple French word finally reached the German language, it was spelt slightly differently, and it now meant “struggle”. Very apt for the German military.

It was finally immortalized by a very famous military leader who decided to name his autobiography on his struggles. Or his “Kampf”.

Think about it the next time you have champagne. (But don’t think out loud, it’s not usually well-received at parties ._.)

Poke it with a stick

Musings, more often than not, require pauses. A pause from routine. A comma. Or a full-stop if the muse is particularly inviting. You can be meta too, and make the full-stop your muse, as I did.

Punctuation comes from Latin “punctus”, which literally means a point. It was so called because the Romans in their manuscripts separated words by little points (you can still do this in our standard word document by turning out formatting marks).

But of course, it doesn’t stop there. Someone who’s very particular about the fine details is punctilious. You know that they will exactly arrive at a place at the particular point in time (or they’re lame and punctual). Sometimes it’s annoying, so much so that you want to poke small holes into their bodies (or puncture), and you can easily justify it by calling it acupuncture and get paid real money for pseudoscience.

The muse trap

Somebody told me to stick to a theme and that isn’t all that bad. There are only so many things one can be inspired by within four-walls. Or is it? If you listen to the likes of Homer, Virgil and Dante, if you are uninspired to pick up that paintbrush, that guitar, or yourself from that bed in the morning, it’s not your fault. You are merely not blessed by the divine sources of art, culture and music: the Muses.

Interestingly that’s where we get words like muse-um (a place to preserve anything inspired by a muse), music and even possibly muzzle, because much like The Thinker, we think with our muzzle in our hand.

Since centuries poets and musicians have regarded themselves as vessels to be filled by these divine spirits of Ancient Greek. Sadly, in today’s more secular world, artists tend to take credit of their work themselves (maybe that’s why we were cursed with that mumble rap phase).

Anyway, like me if praying, even in these biblical circumstances seems unthinkable to you, then embrace that megalomania: be someone’s muse.

Of Endings, Beginnings, and doorways

This Quarantine comes as a peculiar period, almost as a doorway which very clearly defines everyone’s life into how it was before, and how it will be once this period is over. While all of us know many who are metaphorically dispropus (even trisprospus or more, sadly), one cannot usually look both forward and backward at the same time.

Unless you’re Janus. The Roman God of doorways, and boundaries. Having two faces, able to look into two opposite directions at once. All boundaries, and doorways are therefore sacred to him. “Janu”ary, derives its name from Januaris (or time of Janus). And that is also why doorkeepers are called “jani”tors. No surprises there then, that this Quarantine seems like a long long month of winter which doesn’t seem to end. I wouldn’t recommend praying to Janus though, he’s two-faced.

Now that you know what a Janus is, don't be afraid to go crazy with it. Need a word that means two opposite things? It's a Janus-word (example, sanction means both permission and prohibition); need a new contact name for a friend? Bored at home during quarantine and looking for something new to do which also incorporates your random and obscure reading list and don't know what to begin with...?