This Actually Happened

This occurred while I was with my mom helping with all the baking for Thanksgiving. Remember when I told you about the cat she got from my sister?

She cuddled like a baby. It was ridiculous.

Language of Confusion: Fire

Honestly, I might be doing this one because I’m cold. So very cold.

I actually did fire already, but it was one of the first etymology posts I ever did and focused more on the difference between fire and fiery and why they’re stupidly spelled so different. I already explained the spelling thing in my other post, but here’s a refresher: it wasn’t spelled fire until the thirteenth century at the earliest, and before that it was spelled fier. For some reason the spelling changed for that, but not for the adjective version of the word, because words are weird.

Fire comes from the Old English fyr, which was pronounced the same way anyway. Before that it was the Proto Germanic fur and Proto Indo European perjos, from the root paewr, which also means fire, as well as egni-, another word for fire. Yes, they had two. One was for “inanimate” fire, one was for “animate” fire. I’m not really sure how you distinguish them, but that’s why we have the words fire, pyro, and ignite.

Pyro-, as well as related words pyre, pyrite, and others, is from the Greek pyr, fire, which is from paewr-. Ignite showed up in the seventeenth century (ignition showed up a little earlier) from the classical Latin ignitus, the past participle of ignire, to ignite.

But there are other words to look at. Flame has a completely separate origin, coming from the Middle English flaume (noun) and flaumen (verb). The words are from the Anglo French flaume/flaumbe or flaumer/flamber, hence the word flambé, and come from the classical Latin flammula, little flame, from the Proto Indo European bhel-, shine, flash or burn, and origin of words like black and bleach and just so many others. Such as blaze, which comes from the Old English blaese, a flame or blast, from the Proto Germanic blas, which was taken from bhel- also.

Tl;dr: we have a lot of words for fire.

Sources

Online Etymology Dictionary

Google Translate

Omniglot

University of Texas at Austin Linguistic Research Center

University of Texas at San Antonio’s page on Proto Indo European language

University of Texas at Arlington

Tony Jebson’s page on the Origins of Old English

Old English-English Dictionary

Fordham University

The Snap

Maybe you’ve heard about this, maybe you haven’t. Tumblr was dropped from Apple’s app store for the appearance of child porn on their website and as a result they decided to ban all adult content (although in fact this had been brewing for a while, the Apple thing just prompted them to do it sooner). While getting rid of child porn is dear god always a good thing, keep in mind that this website has a TON of users who have been advocating for child abuse and Tumblr has done nothing—nothing—to stop them. People report them all the time and nothing happens! No bans, no deletions. But the second Apple snaps its fingers, uh-oh, better ban all adult content because that will also somehow double their user base. I’m not making that up. They think that’s how it will work. It’s been likened to Thanos’s snap in Infinity Wars due to both how arbitrary it hits people and how ineffective it is in achieving the professed goal.

As someone who has actually been on Tumblr, I know for a fact that there are a huge amount of porn bots. They’re like, half my followers. I don’t really care because I’m not stupid enough to engage them and frankly, they’re spam, and that’s literally what my blog is about. But in Tumblr’s pervious attempt to curb the porn bots and adult content, literally nothing happened to them. But you know what does happen? Click here for an example of the posts that get flagged. Yeah. Not porn. Not adult.

And go take a look at Tumblr’s announcement about what’s no longer going to be allowed after December 17. First of all, female presenting nipples? So does this mean that if the nipples have mustaches, they’re okay? Or is it just an excuse to be able to single out trans people easier? Spoiler alert, it’s the latter. LGBTQA+ people already get flagged for “adult content” all the time so you can bet this so called algorithm is going to screw them over even more, and this is especially bad considering that Tumblr was a major place where they connected and shared with each other. But you know what isn’t banned or restricted on Tumblr at all? White supremacists. You can’t find any boobs and the chronic pain tag is banned, but want to kill all POC? Go right ahead.

For the kids, right?

I’m bummed about this. I generally enjoyed my time on there. It kept me up to date on the freshest of memes. So what’s going to happen to the Spamfiles after December 17. I don’t know, but I don’t think it’ll be on Tumblr anymore. It does occasionally mention sex after all. What a sad way to end the year.

Broken

I must confess: I don’t actually like coffee. I think it’s been twenty years since I last had a cup. But then my mom’s coffee maker broke.

She did order a new one anyway, which was good because the old one didn’t sound quite right. But she at least got to have her morning coffee until it got there.

Oh, and that absolutely was her response when I told her it worked for me. The only difference is that it was by text, not voice, and definitely wasn’t censored. It’s just easier to convey that way in comic form.

Secret Origins: 7

We’re going on seven months since the last time I did one of these. How appropriate.

As a word, seven comes from the Old English seofon, which in spite of the f was pronounced pretty much the same way. It comes from the Proto Germanic sebum and Proto Indo European septm, which also meant seven in spite of the fact that a b and a p are very obviously not a v or an f. No idea why they changed. They just did, and you can see it in words like September, not to mention the replacement of the s with an h in the prefix hepta- (you can thank Greek for that).

As for the numeral, the earliest version is the Brahmi version, which actually looks quite similar to our seven. In Hindu it looked a lot more like a 6 lying on its back, and then the Arabic version is like a v. When the numeral system migrated to Europe, a lot of different places used different versions of numbers, so it could look like a v or y a 7 depending on where you were. Which makes sense. It’s not like they were constantly connected to the internet back then. Places could go years or decades without interacting with each other. Who would have thought to standardize anything?

Sources

Online Etymology Dictionary

Google Translate

Omniglot

Dictionary.com

University of Texas at Austin Linguistic Research Center

University of Texas at San Antonio’s page on Proto Indo European language

University of Texas at Arlington

Tony Jebson’s page on the Origins of Old English

Old English-English Dictionary

Archimedes Laboratory Project

Lumen Learning

December Goals

What a mess this month was. As anyone who follows me on twitter is aware, I got sick after Thanksgiving. Boy, did that suck. Anyway, back to the goals.

November Goals

1. Keep searching for beta readers.

At least this wasn’t affected by me being sick. Still could use more.

2. Get up to 40K on my new WIP (already at about 18K, so this is certainly possible).

I wasn’t able to meet this goal. I was on track until I got sick. I had to use all my energy to do the stuff I had to do instead of the stuff I wanted to do. It was such a bummer.

3. <shudder> Thanksgiving.

Ugh, I’m so glad this is done.

And that’s it for November. What about December?

December Goals

1. Hopefully get beyond 50K in the WIP.

2. Update my etymology page before it gets out of hand.

3. Ugh, now we have Christmas.

So that’s what I’m planning for the last month of 2018. What are you going to do? Any holiday/end of the year plans?

Two Days Later

Personally, I blame my family for this.

Blargh…