Family

They say that sometimes knowing where we come from helps us on the journey to where we're going. To me, that captures the essence of history. And we all walk together, sharing it all but experiencing it in our unique ways. Even families. Especially families.

The word comes from the Latin 'familia' meaning servants and morphed in meaning to include more and more of the household, then morphed some more to discard the people it originally denoted, to finally reach the meaning it has now. What I find particularly interesting is that before 'family', it seems we had the word 'hiwscipe'.

'Hiwscipe' means nothing to us now, just an odd combination of consonant and vowels. Till 400 years ago, it brought the same feeling to hearts that the word family does to us now. Can you imagine that? How things change. The new replaces the old and is so quickly forgotten. Even words. Especially words.

Petrichor

If I had a pet dragon, this is what I would name him- Petrichor. Such a beautiful word and what a meaning! I stumbled upon this when I was looking at a list of little known words. The etymology is beautiful too and surprising- this word was created and added to the English language only in 1964. It's funny that it took so long to name a smell that people have been greedily getting lung-fulls off for centuries, I imagine.

Wikipedia says it comes from the Greek 'petra' meaning stone and 'ichor'- the golden fluid that flows in the veins of Gods in Greek mythology. I'm guessing that the guys who named it wanted something that represented earthiness as well as something heavenly. I couldn't agree more :)

I also find it interesting that the smell itself isn't simply that of wet earth- it comes from the oils released from leaves, that are absorbed by the soil. So the fragrance, in essence, encapsulates water, land and trees. It's the smell of Earth. The smell of life.

Zombie

Yay! I love zombies. The story behind them-
This word comes from the dark and mysterious world of voodoo. As etymonline puts it, the word is of 'West African origin (cf. Kikongo zumbi "fetish;" Kimbundu nzambi "god"), originally the name of a snake god, later with meaning "reanimated corpse" in voodoo cult." What's interesting, if you research some more, is that the Gods aren't really Gods, they seem to be intermediaries that have to be served. Fits the 'Gods are aliens' theory to a T. So, read up!

That's enough with the words now, let's go on to the videos! First, my fav video, one that I share with everyone-




Next, a supercool dance from the even cooler show 'Face Off'. The song, by Natalai, goes 'I'm in love with a zombie...'



Zombies. You gotta love 'em!

Assassin

Looking into the etymology of this word, we find that an assassin is not just a murderer, but a stoned murderer. Glad we got the facts right, eh?

The story is set in the lands of Arabia sometime in the 11th century. A muslim sect was ruled by one Hassan-Al-Sabah, a man who practiced the Ismaili faith. As usual, there were 'disagreements' between the factions existing at the time and Hassan-Al-Sabah, who didn't have enough material power, devised the best form of attack- assassination. This guy took out a lot of his Sunni enemies using Hashisheen- men who doped themselves on hashish before carrying out their gruesome tasks. From 'hashisheen' to 'assassin', the white man's tongue twisting sealed the deal. As wikipedia chillingly puts it-



Knives and daggers were used to kill, and sometimes as a warning, a knife would be placed onto the pillow of a Sunni, who understood the message that he was marked for death.When an assassination was actually carried out, the Hashisheen would not be allowed to run away; instead, to strike further fear into the enemy, they would stand near the victim without showing any emotion and departed only when the body was discovered. This further increased the ruthless reputation of the Hashisheen throughout Sunni-controlled lands.

There is an alternate etymology for the word which isn't quite half as interesting, so I'm going with this one- I think it's the ruthless romantic in me ;)

Connections...

The words orator, adore and oracle have something in common- they stem from the same root word 'orare' meaning something akin to prayer. The words cremation and carbon too share the same root- 'ker' meaning heat. Week and vicarious. Language is full of such links- words that we would never imagine having a connection between them, do.

What strikes me as I look at these connections, again, is an overwhelming sense of history and invention. Here you have this word for this one thing and an umpteen number of related things around you unnamed. So you sit around a fire with your buddies or in the spur of the moment, you create, actually CREATE new words with what you have. Can you imagine being there, doing that? It's like the birth of language slowly unfolding around you. What strikes me again, is that to those people, it must have been an unremarkable thing- creating words. More of a necessity, really. Not weighed down by the millions of years that will follow that will takes these words they cobbled together and evolve them and twist them and be used so effectively everyday...

It's got all the beauty of a fractal, really- we are all offshoots and reflections of that ancient man who discovered in himself one of our most potent powers- creative thought.

Onion

Awwww. I've heard the onion being used as a simile/metaphor before- people are so multi-layered and such...but the origin of the word is a kind of metaphor in itself. The onion is inspired by the old French and subsequent Latin root words- 'oignon' and 'unionem' which mean unity, oneness. This is a reference to its layers which envelop each other in contrast to bulbs like garlic whose elements are a tad bit more...independent? :)


It's cute. I kinda like saying 'oignon' though...has a nice 'oink' sound in it. Oink!

Weird

Weird. Like my taste in men? Klingons, ogres, zombies...weird is one way of putting it. Heh. Let's move on. So weird, from the old english word 'wyrd' orginally meant something akin to fate or destiny. As etymonline puts it, that changed.

The modern sense of weird developed from M.E. use of weird sisters for the three fates or Norns (in Germanic mythology), the goddesses who controlled human destiny. They were usually portrayed as odd or frightening in appearance, as in "Macbeth," which led to the adj. meaning "odd-looking, uncanny," first recorded 1815.

Yay! Proper mythological roots! I love finding these...Norse mythology isn't one that I've really explored too much. A quick search on Norns reveals all sorts of interesting snippets about them. One of them Uror, seems to have actually been called Wyrd.

How the meaning of a word can change from 'destiny' to 'strange', simply because of how someone's eyes perceived a mythical character- that's really something.