The Amateur Etymologist

Oxford Word of the Year 2009: Unfriend

With the Internet being such an integral part of life, it's not surprising how it is changing and influencing the English language at an unprecedented rate. The types of experiences that are being created on the Internet are unlike any other and the English language is exploding with new words to describe these new phenomena. I still remember talking about how the noun access had become a verb when computers started becoming commonplace.

The other phenomenon I've noticed is that really old words have resurfaced with brand-new meanings. Take daemon for example. It used to mean an evil spirit but in the world of computer software, it means a background process. Most people see it when the mail daemon tells them they got an email address wrong.

One other word that has grown on me is interestingness. It's the quality of being interesting. To my knowledge, it first appeared on Flickr. It is used to describe how their algorithm decides which were the most interesting photos of the moment. "Our photos are ranked by their interestingness." Honestly, it's an ugly word, but even ugly can be cute sometimes.

This year's Oxford word of the year is unfriend. It's a verb that means "to remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook". It's the case where a noun has been transformed into a verb. But in Singapore, we've been using it for years without the prefix.

"I friend him but I don't friend you," is what a Singaporean child may say to someone he doesn't want to befriend any longer. It's complete broken English, Singlish really, but a term everyone understands. And now, it's actually English! Well, sort of, if you add the prefix.

Read the rest of the Oxford blog entry to find out what the other candidates were. Personally, I like intexticated.

A double heart

From the Bible, we have inherited a few interesting phrases with the word double in it. Two examples are a double heart and a double mind. Merely hearing the phrase leads one to think that a double heart refers to a person whose heart is moving in two different directions. And that would be quite close to its meaning as it appears in the Bible.

Psalm 12:2—"Everyone utters lies to his neighbor; with flattering lips and a double heart they speak."

In Hebrew, the literal expression is "a heart and a heart". It means someone who is capable of double-crossing and lying. I find that expression very interesting. Likewise, when the Bible speaks of differing weights in Deuteronomy in 25:13, the Hebrew phrase is literally "a stone and a stone".

Deuteronomy in 25:13—"You shall not have in your bag two kinds of weights, a large and a small..."

Which leads me to wonder about the phrase "double-minded man" found in James 1:8.

James 1:8—"He is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways."

The book of James was written in Greek, but perhaps the Hebrew style of using the word twice when a contradiction or contrast was needed was carried over. I'll need someone with more expertise in Koine Greek to confirm this.

Humility vs Humbleness

When someone demonstrates the quality of not being proud or haughty, we say that person has humility. Or is that humbleness? Both words are legitimate and both have the same meaning. They are interchangable.

Example: Instead of arguing, he showed humility when he apologised for his mistake and took responsibility.

It also works if you use humbleness instead of humility.

Example: Instead of arguing, he showed humbleness when he apologised for his mistake and took responsibility.

But to my ear, the word humbleness doesn't sound as good as humility. Try reading out loud the two variations of the above sentence and you'll see what I mean. So I'd rather use humility over humbleness any day. That's my humble opinion.

Yo-yo

The yo-yo is an all-American toy that is familiar to just about everyone. It seems with every generation, it pops up and is extremely popular for a season then fades away, only to reappear again (often with a new marketing campaign and new technology). This is called the yo-yo effect. (Kidding!)

Since my kids are now into yo-yos, I thought I'd do a little digging into the etymology of the word. Turns out the word is from the Philippines. In fact, it's from Ilocano, in northern Luzon. Were yo-yos invented by the Filipinos?

A little more digging around and I discovered that yo-yos have been around for a long, long time. The oldest surviving yo-yo dates from 550B.C. and was made of terra cotta. It's from Greece and there is a painting on a vase that shows a boy playing with a yo-yo. Naturally, it wasn't called a yo-yo then.

In the 1800s, the French referred to the toy as a bandalore while the English referred to it as a quiz. Then in 1916, Scientific American publishes an article about Filipino toys and makes mention of the yo-yo. But the watershed year for the modern yo-yo was 1923 when Pedro Flores, a Filipino living in the US, makes a yo-yo in the tradition of his forefathers. In 1928, he opens his first yo-yo factory in Santa Barbara. The yo-yo craze takes off, helped along by Flores's yo-yo contests.

Then along comes Donald Duncan who sees the potential and buys out the factory and the brand name from Flores. Duncan renames the product as a Duncan yo-yo. And with clever marketing, the yo-yo phenomenon really took off. That's the story of the yo-yo. I like the idea that such an "American toy" actually has roots going back to the Philippines and further back into ancient Greece.

Find out more about yo-yo history from the Duncan website.

Limelight

As I was in the car today, travelling through the streets of Jakarta, I saw a sign that had the word limelight on it. It's commonly understand that to be in the limelight means to be in the center of attention. But what does that have to do with the fruit?

As it turns out, not much. The reference to lime is actually calcium oxide. Limelight was a type of stage lighting used theatres and music halls in the 1860s and 1870s. An oxyhydrogen flame is directed at a cylinder of lime (calcium oxide) and through the combined effects of incandescence and candoluminescence, it produces a bright, intense light. The beam of light is then directed at a performer on stage. The original limelight has since been replaced by modern spotlights but the term still endures.