Language of Confusion: Victorious

Victory showed up in the early fourteenth century from the Anglo French/Old French victorie and classical Latin victoria, which means…victory. Where do these words come from? Anyway, victoria is the past participle of vincere, the origin word for victor (the n is dropped in some tense of the word for some reason). Vincere, to win, can be traced back to the ProtoIndo European word weik, fight or conquer (among other things; it’s a really common word).

This might surprise you, but the word victim does not seem to be related to victory. It showed up in the late fifteenth century specifically meaning a sacrifice (the more general meaning came about fifty years later). It comes from the classical Latin victima, where it had a similar connotation. And that’s it. No vincere, no weik, at least, not that I found. So maybe, maybe not.

The words that are related to victory actually have it in their suffixes. Convince is just vincere with con- in front of it, which makes it “conquer with”. Province is also a vincere word, the pro- meaning before, though no one’s sure exactly how that word’s supposed to make sense. The name Vincent also comes from vincere, and of course, so does the name Victor.

TL;DR: Victory isn’t related to any word that it makes sense for it to be related to.

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

Fordham University

Scare Time

I stumbled across this on Tumblr (ha, that’s almost a rhyme), and I’ve got to say, it’s pretty dang creepy. And since October is the month for creepiness, I figured I should share it with you guys. Fair warning, it’s about an hour long. It’s just an audio file of a teacher telling “The Kimberly Story” to a bunch of high school students (which is good, because it would scare the pants off anyone younger), so you can listen to it in the background while you do something else. But for maximum effect, I suggest waiting until dark and turning off the lights.

For those who don’t want to wait, the gist is this: back when he lived in Texas, a girl in his class disappeared. Then she came back. And then things go from weird to terrifying. Is it real? I don’t know. The things that happened certainly don’t seem like they could be. While it’s based on some actual events, most of it seems embellished. The keyword being “seems”. Either way, real or fake, it’s a damn scary story, perfect for this time of year.

Take a listen.

Then, since I assume you’ll be up for three days straight, you’ll have plenty of time to come back to the blog and share your thoughts.

The Spider

Since last week we had the world’s most annoying fly, it’s time for the world’s scariest spider. Which is a misnomer since all spiders are the world’s scariest.

My iced tea has not had good luck lately.

And don’t ask where I got the torch.

Secret Origins: T

T time!

Don’t you judge me.

T is one of the more stable symbols. If you look at the alphabet gif, you’ll see it’s always pretty much two intersecting lines. It’s funny because some versions of T are, well, on a slant. Latin’s parent alphabet, Etruscan, has similar weirdness with T, with some versions tilty and some with only one arm. I guess when there’s no computerized fonts (or even a printing press), it all depends on whoever’s writing it.

T is much more stable in Greek, where it’s always a T or in lowercase, τ. I guess when something’s not broke, you don’t fix it : ). The Phoenician consonant alphabet that gave birth to the Greek had a bit more variations, using a simple cross that looked like a + sign as well as another tilty T. Whatever it looked like, the symbol was called teth and it meant “mark”, as it was in the proto Sinaitic it was taken from.

Well, that was an easy one.

TL;DR: T’s pretty much always been T :P.

Sources

Alphabet gif

Omniglot

Ancient Scripts

Mysterious Etruscans

Phoenician.org

October Goals

Ugh, September. UGH!!! It started out bad and only managed to get worse from there. One of my cats got out of the house and never came back, and honestly I’ve been devastated about that. Then I got sick—me!—and that included double ear infections (you saw the comic) which made me feel like I constantly had cotton in my ears. You know what I do when I’m writing? Listen to music/television. You know what’s really hard to do with ear infections? Exactly that.

September Goals

1. Work on REMEMBER notes. I’d really prefer getting them all done, but…it’s not going to happen and no amount of goading myself will help, so I might as well be realistic and promise myself to do something.

Nope. Not a bit, which I’m disappointed in, but I was also depressed and unable to concentrate, so I should probably cut myself a little slack there…

2. Add 10K to the new WIP. Only ten because I really want to make some headway on those notes, and I figure it will be better not to over commit.

See above.

3. Work on making the stick figure comics a regular part of the blog. Honestly, I’m surprised how many people seem to enjoy them. I probably won’t be able to think of something funny every week, but maybe every other.

At least I managed to do this one…

This month’s goals are going to be modest…I just hope I do them this time…

October Goals

1. Work on, and preferably finish, REMEMBER notes. For real. Seriously.

2. Finish my non-writing side project (I don’t usually put these on the list, but I might actually be able to do this one).

3. More stick figure comics! You guys are weirdly easy to please.

All right, that’s it. Was your September a month of unending horror somehow still going on despite being over or did something good actually happen? What are your plans for October?

The Fly

This is the story of my life.

Language of Confusion: Greetings

We have a lot of ways to say greet each other, but let’s just stick with the basics, shall we?

Hello

It surprised me to find out that hello is very recent, only showing up in 1883, and gaining popularity because people decided they liked to use it to greet people on the telephone. It comes from a word we used to get people’s attention, hallo, which I don’t think I’ve ever heard in conversation. That word is also fairly recent, showing up in 1781 (anything with exact years attached to it has to be recent), although it had a variant, halow (no relation to hallow or hollow, by the way, although it did give us holler), that originated way back in the middle of the fifteenth century. Hallo itself comes from another word, holla (no, not as in “Everybody holla!”), which was a command to get people to stop before it morphed from “stop what you’re doing” to “stop and give me your attention” sometime in the late sixteenth century. Holla comes from the French word holá, which is basically the equivalent of “Whoa!”.

Hi

Hi first showed up in 1862 (man, what did people use to greet each other before then?). No one’s sure where it came from, but it’s possible that it’s a variant of a Middle English word, hy/hey, which was basically the same thing. It’s not related to hello even a little bit, another thing that surprised me.

Hey

Hey is relatively old, showing up in Middle English in the early thirteenth century. Back then it had a bunch of different variations with slightly different spellings and pronunciations, like hei and ai and heh, all of which was an interjection with a different connotation—one might mean sorrow, another might mean anger. Because if there’s one thing English needs, it’s emotionally specific words.

Wow. That was a quick one.

Sources

Online Etymology Dictionary

University of Texas at Arlington