From The Spamfiles

Yay! Spam time again! I don’t have to write a real post!

Wow. I did not know this was what Christianity researched. I was way off.

I’m…a little worried about the tasty thing. Please don’t be hiding outside my house with a knife and fork.

I’m insulted that this spam is so lazy that they didn’t either bother to fill in the badly worded template! They could at least put some effort into spamming me!

I MAY have won a Sam’s Club Reward Card! Stop the frigging presses.

It’s almost Christmas! Show off your body! That’s prime body showing off time! Actually it probably is for people in the southern hemisphere. But not here! Cold! Snow!

I have standards, mike. I only date guys who capitalize their first names. And aren’t an awkward amount older than me.

Magnetized

You know how dangerous magnets are for computers, right?

Okay, maybe they weren’t that high. But you should know by now that I like to be dramatic.

Language of Confusion: Question Words

You know, like who, what, where, when, why, which, and how. Maybe we’ll get an explanation as to why how is the only one not beginning with W. Why don’t we change that?

Who

Who comes from the Old English hwa, which could also mean someone or anyone as well as who. It’s from the Proto Germanic hwas and earlier, the Proto Indo European kwo-, which was the source of a lot of interrogative pronouns, as we’re about to see. No explanation as to why it switched from K to H, but it does seem like the H to W thing is just because the former has softened over the years. And whom is from the same place, just via hwam, which is another version of hwa.

What

What is from the Old English hwaet, where it could mean what but also who, something...and hark. It’s from the Proto Germanic hwat, which you may recognize as what with the first two letters switched, and the Proto Endo European kwod, which is a form of kwos. Another form for who.

Why

Why comes from the Old English (again) hwi, which was a form of hwaet called the instrumental case. Instrumental is an old grammar form that appeared in Old English (Russian actually still has it) that indicates indirect receivers of action, objects of prepositions, or that a thing is being used. Basically why comes from a form of what that isn’t used anymore and as we all know it comes from the word for who. Although Proto Indo European also had a version of why, kwi, again, another version of kwo.

Where

Okay, you can probably guess at least some of this one. Where comes from the Old English hwaer, which means where. No surprises here. It’s from the Proto Germanic hwar, which is from, all together now, kwo. Are you beginning to see a pattern?

When

I probably don’t even need to look this one up to guess, but here we go. When is from the Old English whaenne, which means when as a direct question. It’s from the Proto Germanic hwan-/hwa- which… looks very familiar. Dammit, it’s the same one as before and it’s from kwo-.

Which

I’m no longer expecting anything new. Which was hwilc/hwaelc in Old English, and was actually short for hwi-lic, “of what form”. So yeah. Hwi again. And the lic means body (body/form) and is where like comes from. Hwi-lic comes from the Proto Germanic hwa-lik-, and we all should know by now that hwa/hwi comes kwo-.

How

How comes from the Old English hu, just how. Before that, it’s the Proto Germanic hwo and of course Proto Indo European kwo. No clue as to why this one stuck with H while none of the other ones did. Just weird I guess.

tl;dr: All question words go back to kwo-. It is the one true question.

Sources

Online Etymology Dictionary

Google Translate

University of Texas at Austin Linguistic Research Center

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

Tony Jebson’s page on the Origins of Old English

Old English-English Dictionary

University of Massachusetts Amherst

293 Keys

I found a game. In it, all you do is search through a pile of keys and try them in a lock until one fits. Then you leave and see how many tries it took you.

That’s it. Seriously.

It’s the stupidest, most pointless game ever. The controls are wonky (don’t knock a key off the cliff before you’ve tried it), it’s not a particularly attractive game, and there’s literally nothing to do except put keys in the lock.

So why can’t I stop playing it??

Have you ever been unable to stop doing anything pointless? What’s the most addictive dumb game you’ve ever found?

Bedspread

I swear, they weren’t on there until the second the package containing my new comforter arrived.

No, of course I can’t move them myself. I’m not a monster.

Language of Confusion: Reluctantly

Just a short one today, as I’m super busy.

Neither reluctance nor reluctant are very old, both having showed up in the mid seventeenth century. Now reluctant used to mean unwilling, pretty close to what we use it for, but reluctance specifically meant the “act of struggling against” when it first came into being and it wasn’t until a couple of decades later that it meant unwillingness to do something. And also it comes from an awesome word that we don’t use anymore, reluct, which means struggle or rebel against.

Reluct (why don’t we have it anymore??) comes from the classical Latin reluctari, which means to resist, not a huge leap. It’s a combination of the prefix re-, against, and luctari, struggle, so it actually makes sense. And hey, if you’re reluctant to do something you’re definitely going to struggle against it, right? Luctari can actually be traced all the way back to the Proto Indo European lug-to, bent. Okay, that one I can’t figure. Bending something is a struggle? I guess if it’s not very bendable. I don’t know what it could be referring to, though. Not metal, as Proto Indo European is like fifty five hundred years old and that’s way before metalwork was used.

I’m reading too much into this. It went from bent to unwilling. Let’s leave it at that.

Sources

Online Etymology Dictionary

Google Translate

Omniglot

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

April Goals

Ugh, this month is going to be busy, isn’t it? Expect posts to get a lot more succinct. Like this.

March Goals

1. Actually write 10K this time. Or, at the very least, finish last month’s 10K.

I did finish the 10K from the last one, but because I got so busy with other stuff I didn’t press it any further.

2. See if I can by that book I want to read for research. And, you know, read it.

Did not get to this, unfortunately. I don’t know when I’m ever going to get time to read again.

3. Try to think up something fun to do. Because we could all use a little fun right now.

…More like the opposite of this.

Okay, this month.

April Goals

1. Get at least 5000 words done. I know that’s not a lot, but I’m so busy!

2. Get to work on my side-blog project. I’m going to need to work super hard to get all this done. Thankfully this might be doable since I have some awesome people helping me.

3. Update my etymology page. I don’t want to put it off too long!

What are you up to this month?