Words To Ponder
By
Michael L. Craner
Welcome back to the second edition of Words To Ponder. The English language can be a very fascinating study when one begins to scratch the surface. We have words for everything, including the study of the history of words, which is Etymology, and happens to be this month’s Word To Ponder, not so much for its own history, but to help give my readers an understanding of where we will be going with this column, and why I find the subject interesting. Last month I covered the word Gypsy briefly, to show how a simple, single word could inspire the creative process in a person, after learning a bit about its history and usage.
Before I totally bore everyone out there with the impression of a column about something as lifeless as words and their histories, consider this: words are living entities, which change and evolve with the times and those of note who use them prominently. Furthermore, understanding more about carefully chosen words that we hear or read may open up hidden or underlying messages that the writer may or may not have intended, which could open up brand new perceptions for the reader/listener.
Like many words in the English language, Etymology has Latin roots, etymologia from the 14th century, which is interesting to note in itself. If so many words are derived from Latin, it can’t very well be called a “dead language” anymore, can it? Anyway, Merriam-Webster defines Etymology as “the history of a linguistic form (as a word) shown by tracing its development since its earliest recorded occurrence in the language where it is found, by tracing its transmission from one language to another, by analyzing it into its component parts, by identifying its cognates in other languages, or by tracing it and its cognates to a common ancestral form in an ancestral language.” Or in layperson's terms, word histories.
I also suspect that a whole new generation of changes and additions to words and their etymology is in progress at this time thanks to the World Wide Web and the number of people able to make public anything they want to say. For example while researching for this column, I made the mistake of misspelling etymology, and searched the Internet for “etomology”. While this spelling did not appear in the online dictionary or encyclopedia I was using, (or my MS Word Spell Checker for that matter) it DID appear in quite a number of websites. I’m not talking about a few high school sophomore Geocites homepages either. This incorrect spelling is being used worldwide at universities and scientific organizations too. I also discovered, that when you misspell a word, you can make it take on pretty much any meaning you want it to since I found “etomology” being associated with the study of insects, more correctly called “Entomology” as well as the study of word origins, “Etymology” which we are currently learning about.
I don’t know about you, but I would be leery spending money and studying “Etomology” from a place with “Academic Support and Excellence” in their name, to find out they are offering a language course where they don’t even know the correct spelling of the discipline. The funny thing is that the first link on their list of reference sites is to the very same online dictionary that I use, and is located just below their course offerings.
At any rate, this is just positive proof that my statement about words being a living entity, and job security for the REAL Etymologists, is true as they scramble to keep up with the rest of us. Now that you have a better idea for where “Words To Ponder” will take you, and what etymology is, join me next month as we dig into another word, which I hope will be entertaining, educational, and inspiring.
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