Lord of the Flies

I only wish this wasn’t a true story.

I have no idea what was causing them to appear, just that the largest congregation seemed to be the wall behind the television. Frankly, I don’t want to know more.

Language of Confusion: Dict-, Part II

This is part two of the three part series. And I mean it this time: no laughing!

Edict showed up in the late fifteenth century, meaning it’s older than words that begin with dict-. It actually appeared a couple of centuries earlier as (get this) edit, but no, it’s not related to the other edit. Because why would it be? Anyway! Edict comes from the Old French edit and classical Latin edictum/edicere, which is just edict and writing. The e comes from ex-, out, and dicere is to say, so it’s to say out. I guess an edict is something you say out loud…

Predict is relatively recent, having showed up in the early seventeenth century, although prediction showed up a century earlier. It comes from the classical Latin praedicatus/praedicere, predicted and to predict. No shockers there. Pre- means before, and dicere is say, so it’s say before, which is the only way you can really make a prediction. I mean, predicting things after they happen is pretty easy.

And now for a word that’s always really bugged me. Indict showed up in the early fourteenth century with the same meaning we have today. It comes from the Anglo French enditer, indict, and Old French enditier, which could mean indict and also write or compose. Before that, it’s the Vulgar Latin indictare, declare or accuse, a combination of in-, in, and dictare, which if you’ll remember from last week is slightly different than dicare—it’s the frequentative, the continuous action word. This makes the word “in saying”, if that makes sense. Okay, no it doesn’t. Nor does why English decided to switch to the Latinized spelling of it when we don’t say the frigging C. Seriously, what the hell.

Okay, stay tuned next week for the fascinating conclusion.

Sources

Online Etymology Dictionary

Google Translate

Omniglot

University of Texas at Austin Linguistic Research Center

Encyclopaedia Britannica

Fordham University

July Goals

And kind of June goals since I didn’t do them. I can tell you, that is one month that I’m glad is gone.

Now let’s look way back at May.

May Goals

1. Look at revisions for old projects and see what needs to be done.

I did do this, and even did some revising! But I didn’t do nearly as much as I thought I would, due to being busy and then the world exploding.

2. Come up with a plan for what I want to write next. In addition to the revising, I should look at doing something brand new.

Unfortunately, I didn’t do this. I kept trying to think of what I wanted to write and I’d get really excited about planning it out for a day, then go What? No. I don’t want to do this. It’s a terrible idea. It was all kind of a mess.

3.  Update the Etymology page on the blog. It’s been a while…

At least I did this! It was easily the best part of the last two months and that’s really kind of sad.

Goals-wise, it wasn’t a very good month. And also everything else-wise. Especially everything else-wise. But maybe July can be better.

July Goals

1. See how I’m doing on my yearly resolution, because I’m betting it’s not good.

2. Figure out if I can block off some time once a week or something for me to just write.

3. Write something, anything, without any strings attached (like I have to finish it or it has to have a certain word count).

So, that’s the plan. So what are your plans for July? Doing anything now that summer is in full swing? Or winter, if you’re in the southern hemisphere?

Known Issue

Have you ever thought that operating systems are designed by someone who really hates functionality? Because I have. Often.

There were several different fixes for the problem because, you know, it’s not like Microsoft ever bothered to correct what’s causing it even though it’s been happening for almost a year now. It’s like, hey, we’ll give you back the Start menu! But yeah, it randomly breaks. Whoops : (

Language of Confusion: Dict-, Part I

Another multi-part series? The madness! Or maybe I’m just picking very widespread word pieces. This week: words that begin with dict-.

No giggling.

Diction showed up in the mid sixteenth century, but it only meant a word—it was a couple of decades later that it started to morph into what we use it as today. It comes from the Late Latin dictionem, a saying or a word, which can be traced to the classical Latin dicere, speak or say. It can be traced to the Proto Indo European deik, to point out, which just happens to be the origin word of digit because fingers point out literally.

Dictate showed up at the end of the sixteenth century, meaning pretty much what it means today. It came from the classical Latin dictatus, which is just dictated, the past tense of dictare, to dictate. Dictare is a frequentative (repetitive action word, like wrestling is to wrest, as opposed to wresting) of dicere, so we got these two words from different versions of the same word.

Dictator, though related, has quite the history on its own. It showed up in the late fourteenth century, meaning it’s older than all the other words here. It comes from the classical Latin dictator, which means...dictator. I’m not sure what else you were expecting. And it comes from dictare like dictate does, but went through even less changing. I guess English didn’t feel the need to change the word for a tyrannical overlord.

Then there’s dictionary, which showed up in the early sixteenth century before either of the above. It comes from the Medieval Latin dictionarium, a collection of words and phrases (yeah, I see it) and the classical Latin dictionarius, of words, and dictio, expression or word.

Sources

Online Etymology Dictionary

Google Translate

Dictionary.com

Omniglot

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

Dictionary of Medieval Latin

Orbis Latinus

The Death of Tweetdeck, Part 2

I didn’t expect this to be a continuing series, but frankly, I’ve been kind of annoyed with Janetter’s, which I think was causing problems with my computer. So I went looking for another, and found Yoono.

It’s…okay, I guess. Not great. Servicable, I think is the best word for it.

Pros

---Still calls Favorites Favorites! Woo!

---Fairly intuitive.

---Lets you link a bunch of different social media sites, so you can not only look at updates from Facebook and LinkedIn and whatever, you can also update them all at the same time.

Cons

---There’s very little customization of the appearance, and I’m not a fan of the plain white background.

---Navigation is a bit awkward, although you should be able to figure it out (there’s a little icon in the bottom corner that lets you scroll).

---The updates only come in about every minute or so it’s not exactly instant.

---It only lets you go look at a fixed number of posts, so you can only go back so far. Seriously?!

Honestly, I’d stick with Janetter over this one…except, like I said, I think Janetter is causing some glitches in my computer, namely that it’s causing touchpad driver to periodically crash, which means I can’t scroll with it and that’s just so annoying. I don’t know if this problem would happen to other people—my computer is at the crappy end of the technology scale—but the fact that it’s happening at all makes me reconsider their worth. And since I’ve uninstalled it, I haven’t had any problems with my touchpad.

Sigh. We really can’t get something as good as Tweetdeck, can we?

One Of Those Days

Seriously, the universe is out to get me.

In my defense, it was like the third time that day I had to clean up cat puke.