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Know

Tuesday Etymology Lesson: know

From the Latin gnoscere, and the Greek gno.  You’ll recognize gno from the words gnostic and gnosis, meaning, “knowledge, enlightenment or oneness with god.”

For millennia humans have feared knowledge and advancement as they would the supernatural.  The myth of Prometheus is the perfect example of this.  Prometheus the Titan, chained to a stone to endure physical torture for all eternity, simply for giving mankind the flaming spark of knowledge.  Or the myth of Adam & Eve, cast out from paradise because they dared to eat from the tree of knowledge. 

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El suplicio de Prometeo (The torture of Promethus), Jean-Louis-Cesar Lair, 1819.

For thousands of years we imprisoned, tortured, and burned the best minds among us for daring to know information about the mysteries of the universe.  Then when we were done murdering them, we elevated them as martyrs, saints, and geniuses, setting them above us and away from us, never accepting that we are all capable of the same knowing, failing to realize the fullest potential of our humanity.  Ignorance is bliss.  This is the greatest tragedy of the human race. 

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Liminal

Monday Etymology Lesson: liminal

From the Latin liminalis or limen meaning, “threshold,” from which we also get the word limit.  Liminal describes a place between two defined spaces, without ever fully belonging to either of them. 

In mythology these thresholds or liminal spaces are often the realm of deities.  Able to pass between the realms of the living and the dead, the messengers Hermes, Ganesha, and the trickster spirit Eshu in voodoo tradition, are all liminal deities. 

The Romans worshiped Janus, god of gates, doorways, and beginnings, for whom we get the name of our first month, January, the gate of the new year.  Janus is shown as having two faces, one facing backward to the past, and one facing toward the future. Here he is depicted pacifying the Roman war goddess Bellona, sister of Mars, to restore peace.

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Fart

Friday Etymology Lesson: fart

Sigh, my friend John Adams insisted on this one, so you get what you asked for, the etymology of fart.

One of the oldest words in the English vocabulary, fart comes from two Proto-Indo-European words perd, meaning, “break wind loudly,” and pezd “break wind softly.”  Obviously these two words are onomatopoeias.  I’ve mentioned before that d sounds often morph into t sounds in Indo-European.  Well, the same thing happened with p and f sounds, so from perd we got furzen in German, which became fart in English.

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The Divine Gas, mural art for the Boston ICA by Chiho Aoshima.

Speaking of the English, their custom of rhyming slang gave us raspberry tart as a slang term for fart, which is why it’s called a raspberry when you make a fart sound like Lily Tomlin used to do at the end of her Edith Ann character skits.  Aaaaand now I’m dating myself.

 

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And that’s the truth! Phbbt!
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Phenomenon

Thursday Etymology Lesson: phenomenon

Two words for the price of one today!  Phenomenon from the Ancient Greek word phaínō, meaning “I show.”  In Latin phaenomenon, meaning, “appearance, particularly in the sky” and noumenon, from Greek nous, meaning, “I think, I mean, perception, intuition, understanding.” 

In a way phenomenon is the opposite of noumenon, because a phenomenon is a thing that is seen and observed, and a noumenon is a thing that is known (or maybe unknown?) without being seen. 

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Noumenon, sculpture by Jan Kuck.

Confused yet?  In simple terms, noumenon represents a thing outside of the sensory filters we use to perceive the natural world.  Humans tend to provide names and stories about objects in order to accept them as known.  Stories like, this is a table, I sit in a chair, I am separate from you, you are separate from me.  The concept of a noumenal world is necessary if one believes that our understanding of the world is not limited to what we can perceive with our senses.  It may sound floofy, but in a way, science would not exist without this concept.  

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Melancholy

Wednesday Etymology Lesson: melancholy

This one’s a bummer, folks.  Today’s word is melancholy [sad trombone].  The word itself comes from the Ancient Greek words kholḗ meaning, “gall, or bile,” and mélas meaning, “dark, black, murky.”  You’ll recognize mélas from the word melanin. 

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Melancholy,1801, by French painter Constance Marie Charpentier

Back in medieval times, physicians believed that the body had four humors, which were basically four bodily fluids, blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile.  These humors corresponded to the four elements, air, water, fire, earth respectively.  They could become imbalanced for any number of reasons.  Ancient physicians believed that a melancholic state of depression or great sadness was caused by an excess of black bile, or earth, in the body originating in the spleen.  Treatments for excessive black bile included, of course, blood letting by way of leeches, mistletoe poisoning, consumption of moist warm foods, and dancing! 

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Train

Tuesday Etymology Lesson: train

Those of us who ride the MBTA will be amused to know that the word train originally meant, “delay” or, “a drawing out,” and also, “procession,”  From Old French, trainer “to pull, drag, draw,” from Vulgar Latin *traginare.  It began to be used to describe a locomotive in the 1800s.

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Arctic

Monday Etymology Lesson: arctic

Today’s word is inspired by the frigid temperatures we are experiencing.  Arctic, from the Ancient Greek word arktikós, meaning, “land of the Great Bear.”  The greek word árktos means “bear” and arktikós references the constellation Ursa Major, the bear.

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Seen in the northern sky, Ursa Major has served mankind as a beacon toward the north for millennia.  A remarkable number of distinct civilizations have named this constellation “bear,” from the Ancient Greeks, to the Iroquois and Wampanoag people of pre-european America.

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Vincent van Gogh painted the constellation, Ptolemy listed it in the second century, Homer wrote about it, and so did Shakespeare.  The Romans believed that the bear was the nymph Callisto, transformed by Juno in a fit of jealousy over her husband Jupiter’s lustful longings. 

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Twin

Friday Etymology Lesson: twin

This word is near and dear to my heart because I am an identical twin.  Twin comes from a Proto Indo European word dwóh, which you’ll recognize from the word duo, as well as many other words in various languages for the numeral two.  Dwóh morphed into dwino, and then twinaz, through a linguistic tendency wherein d and t sounds get swapped for each other.  Twinaz became twynn, twinn, and then twin. 

Here’s a photo of me with my own twin, Abby, who has been my constant companion since before I was even aware of my own consciousness.  For a tiny infinite moment, she and I were one cell, one being, una, nova, singulare tantum.

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Zeitgeist

Thursday Etymology Lesson: zeitgeist

Today’s word is made up of two German words zeit meaning, “time” and geist, meaning, “spirit.”  Our English word ghost also comes from geist which came from a Proto Indo European root gheis which meant, “to be amazed, excited or frightened.”  The word zeitgeist literally means, “time-spirit.” 

The word asks us to question whether we can surpass the spirit of our own time, or if we are helpless against it, as is it not true that being born in the time we are in, the spirt of our time is our own spirit, and thus inescapable?

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Connection

Wednesday Etymology Lesson: connection

Today’s word is one of the things that is most important to me in life.  From Latin, com- meaning “together” and nectere or necto/nexus meaning both, “I bind” and also, “that which binds or ties together.”

In a way, the word connection is a like a little magic spell, willing things together.  This word is very old and so is the force it represents.  The very atoms that make up our bodies are bound together by electromagnetism.  Everything is connected, and so are we.