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Showing posts with label Word Origins. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Word Origins. Show all posts
Monday, March 17, 2014
Monday, December 30, 2013
Friday, May 17, 2013
The Origins of the Spelling Bee
Merriam-Webster digs deep.
From the piece...
Spelling-fight,” “spelling school,” “spelling match,” “trials in spelling,” “spelling combat,” “spelldown.” It seems that no fixed name for the activity existed, and yet Americans always understood exactly what was meant. Evidence of the term “spelling bee” in print dates from this period of nostalgia and renewed interest. Thus, paradoxically, the new name “spelling bee” dates from the very time when the activity was used to evoke the past. The New York Times used “old-fashioned” to modify “spelling bee” in 1892 and again in 1908; by the time of its coverage of the congressman’s victory of 1913, the terms seemed to be linked inextricably.
The word bee had been used in conjunction with other group activities, such as a “quilting bee,” or occasions when farmers or neighbors would help each other, such as “husking bee,” “apple bee,” or “raising bee.” More grimly, The Oxford English Dictionary also provides evidence of the terms “hanging bee” and “lynching bee.” Despite the obvious link to industriousness and teamwork, this use of the word bee seems to have nothing to do with buzzing insects. The word’s etymology in the Unabridged shows that this bee is an alteration of a word that meant “voluntary help given by neighbors toward the accomplishment of a particular task,” and descends from the Middle English word bene. Bene also gave us the word boon, understood today to mean “blessing” but which also has the meaning of “benefit” or “favor.”
Monday, February 11, 2013
20 Words You Didn't Realize Were Inspired by People
The list, care of Flavorwire.
From said list...
begonia — “Any of various tropical or subtropical plants of the genus Begonia, widely cultivated as ornamentals for their usually asymmetrical, brightly colored leaves.” After Michel Bégon (1638-1710), former governor of the French colony of Haiti and patron of botany.
bloomers — “A costume formerly worn by women and girls that was composed of loose trousers gathered about the ankles and worn under a short skirt.” After Amelia Bloomer, a women’s rights advocate who popularized the style in the early 1850s.
bowdlerize — “To remove material that is considered offensive or objectionable from (a book, for example).” After Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825) who published an expurgated edition of Shakespeare in 1818, leaving out things like Ophelia’s suicide (it was an accidental drowning, of course), and sanitizing Lady Macbeth’s “Out, damned spot!” into to “Out, crimson spot!”
Monday, July 09, 2012
Monday, June 25, 2012
Wait - How Did We Name Colors Like Orange Anyway? And Is It Messing With Our Brains?
Yes!
From a piece on Empirical Zeal...
There are plenty of other languages that blur the lines between what we call blue and green. Many languages don’t distinguish between the two colors at all. In
I find this fascinating, because it highlights a powerful idea about how we might see the world. After all, what really is a color? Just like the crayons, we’re taking something that has no natural boundaries – the frequencies of visible light – and dividing into convenient packages that we give a name.
Friday, May 25, 2012
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Saturday, October 01, 2011
Monday, July 25, 2011
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Where Did the Word Robot Come From, Anyway?
Good is here to answer your query.
From the piece...
“Robot” has a refreshingly clear-cut origin. As Oxford English Dictionary Chief Editor John Simpson writes, “In 1920 the Czech writer Karel Čapek published his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots)—in Czech, but with a strange new word (in English) in the title. Čapek said that the word was suggested to him by his brother Josef (from Czech robota ‘forced labour, drudgery’).” Čapek’s play featured artificial creatures that were biological rather than mechanical, created to do crappy jobs. That play made its way to New York in 1922, and the robot invasion of English was underway.
The 1920s saw the word breed like bunny-bots. As early as 1923, it was being used for cold, emotionless people, a sense Tim Siedell revisited recently: “A remote sub made the Gulf leak worse. Stories appear about Al Gore's sex life. All in all, a pretty bad week for robots.” The 1920s also saw the first uses of “robot clerk,” “robot plane,” “robot station,” “robot army,” “robotesque,” and “robotian,” and by the end of the decade, automatic street lights were also called "robots."
One of the more violent meanings didn’t emerge till World War II: the “robot bomb” of the Germans, which was self-propelled and also called a “doodle bug,” “robot airplane,” and “robomb.” In the mid-1980s, software robots popped up, showing the tendency of “robot” to be used much like “smart” for any program or device that has some autonomy.
Though science fiction (especially in the movies) has dominated our collective sense of robot-itude, robots are far from a fantasy these days. You don’t have to peruse magazines like New Scientist or Robot for long to see examples of real robots that can fly, cook, bow, dance, shake hands, climb rocks, work as a team, and assist geriatric patients.
Monday, July 12, 2010
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