One of my favorite word histories is the weird story. Most people have seen at least one of the many classical paintings of the Three Graces, three nicely naked ladies also known as the Three Charities. These were ancient Greek goddesses represent good stuff like good will, nature, or good luck. For bad luck there were the Three Fates, or Morai. These were the goddesses of past, present, future or sometimes they are at their spinning wheel dealing out your birth, life, and death. Anyway, they were fates. Not so good as the Graces. In Anglo-Saxon the fates were called the three wyrde. So along comes Shakespeare’s Macbeth who meets the three Weird Sisters who foretell his fate. They were actually, in modern English, the Three Fate Sisters. And they were so scary, strange, and unworldly that weird sisters became remembered for their weirdness. So the word for fate became the word for strange and frightening: weird.

After surviving the suffocating, pervasive Christmas season, journalists turn to year-in-reviews. At the conclusion of this year, and God be thanked for ending it, no one wants to remember 2020, Annos Horribilus. But word-nerds look for the new word introductions, most used and most looked-up words, and word-of-the year reviews and that is my solace. Well, not the word of the year from the American Dialect Society which for 2020 is covid which we’d all like not to think about. Merriam-Webster selected pandemic a word which at least has an interesting etymology linking pan and demos. It was looked-up more than 100,000 times in one day. I like the M-W but I don’t like their acceptance of lookup as word acceptable in formal writing but I guess they would know. I’m going for the spelling look-up. I rather liked learning about a neologism from the past. In an article in the NYT Sunday Review 27 December, Emma Goldberg brings up blockbuster a new word from 1942. Now people refer to blockbuster movies, and there was for years a now defunct Blockbuster movie rental chain. Anything that is unique and spectacular might be referred to as a blockbuster. A blockbuster is also a racist real estate seller who disrupts markets with a scheme to lower prices from a fear of racial minority purchases. The illegal real estate practice sense of blockbuster uses the “block” part meaning a city block. That is also the sense that the original term uses. During World War two, there were developed and apparently used bombs that could destroy entire city blocks, hence blockbuster bombs.

Merriam-Webster also notes a 24,800% spike in look-ups for schadenfreude, not a new word at all, but for many it was a wonderful way to accurately describe our delight at the demise of Donald Trump. Loser of the Year 2020.

Philosophy papers require an argument. That is, the writer must not only present her thesis, but also present an opposing thesis. The opposition should be presented fairly and not as a straw man argument. And then of course, a refutation of the opposition.

The word argue comes from French through Latin arguere but, back further, from the root arg, meaning bright or shining. Latin for silver is argentum with the element symbol Ag. The idea seems to be that an argument is a way of making clear a position. Elucidating.

The delightful Anu Garg, who writes Word-of-the-Day offers today ursiform, having the shape of a bear. I easily guessed this one, not because of all the church Latin I forgot, but because of Ursa Major, the Great Bear constellation. I think of the roundish belly of a teddy bear (yes, named for the President Teddy). Garg also offers a comment on those who love teddy bears, who are arctophiles. But wait, arc is from the Greek form of of L. ursa which was arctos. So that led me to the Arctic, certainly not literally. The Arctic, is the land of the Great Bear, Ursa Major, which circles around in the northern sky. So the Arctic is named for a bear, but not the polar bear which lives up there but for the bear who lives up there in the sky. The southern polar region is the Antarctic, sort of anti-arctic, opposite of the northern bear and there are no polar bears down there either. You might call the Antarctic the nether region, because nether is unrelated to north but refers to down below, like the nether regions down below your belt. And as for Teddy Roosevelt, he was not an arctophile, rather he liked to shoot real bears. He passed on shooting one particular bear who had been tied to a tree by the president’s companions and thus begat the teddy bear toy, a symbol of kindness and sympathy.

Ok, so Adriel has, in the past, so many times checked the meaning and history of the word bitter end that I may as well write it out before dementia takes hold. The better term for a Trump hold out is dead ender but bitter ender applies as well. The bitter is not the bitter taste left in the mouth after hearing a MAGA bitter ender bemoan whatever loss his leader has sustained. The bitter that tastes like rich, dark coffee is probably related to the word bite (BTW: a sense of bitter taste is genetic I hear, some people can’t taste bitter). The bitter in bitter end probably is related to bit, as small piece. A bitter is a post on a ship or other sailing vessel or on a dock. A rope is tied and wrapped around the bitter and used to belay, that is, to tie something down like to fasten the ship to the dock. So if that rope plays out its length, the very last end will be at the bitter. The bitter end.

I am getting much of this from https://www.etymonline.com/ because I know zilch about seafaring. I do know I’ll hold out for Barack Obama’s brilliant legacy to the bitter end.

I can’t possibly understand the fascination with travel. Books about travel? I guess any form of misery is a good topic for deluded writers. Travel is torture. If you have never sat in coach on an overseas flight, then I suppose you can only imagine what it is to be condemned to be fastened to the stocks in the public square, although for my part that would be preferable. Ask yourself, BTW, if the condemned to the stocks got bathroom breaks as required by wage and hour laws. Or just tryout an airline restroom after 12 hours in flight. Unthinkable. Or even a road trip through Nebraska, or the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Misery. Speakers of English know this is torture or ought to know it. The word “travel” is a blood relative, in fact a descendant of “travail” another apt description of travel in any form. From Middle English “travailen” from Latin “tripaliare” meaning “torture.” But wait there is more, “tripaliare” is from “tripalium” the Roman form of stocks, a gruesome device whereby the victim was spread-eagled on three stakes. Picture it:

…loving this sentence from Wikipedia: “In botany, a peduncle is a stem supporting an inflorescence, or after fecundation, an infructescence.”

…is a vote counter in Britain. As in screwed by the scrutineers.