Wednesday WOLF - Ampersand

I'm a nerd. In fact such a big nerd that I tend to look up word origins in my spare time because I'm fascinated by our language. The odder the origin, the better. I've got a collection of random information in my brain that makes me an awesome Trivial Pursuit partner, but is completely useless when it comes to real world application. Like say, job applications.

In any case, I thought I'd share some of this random crap with you in the form of the new acronym-ific series. I give you - Word Origins from Left Field - that's right, the WOLF. Er... ignore the fact that the "from" doesn't fit.

Anybody who plays Wheel of Fortune knows that this little character - & - is called an "ampersand." But why? What the hell does that mean? Me being me, I used to think it was actually called an "and for stand" meaning, "it stands for and." But, uh, no, that's too easy, and much too sensible to be the real answer.

It appears that back in the day when few people could write, and monks were doing most of the transcribing, they got really, really tired of writing "and" all the time, so they came up with a little symbol that was the equivalent of the letters from the Latin "and"(et) mashed together, which explains why it looks the way it does, but not why it would be called an ampersand.

That bit comes from the education of children in the Middle Ages, when they were taught their alphabet and the distinction between the letter "a" and the word "a," as in A-B-C as opposed to "A boy and a dog." The Latin term per se meaning "by itself," when the teacher wanted the children to understand the difference between "A" the letter and "A" the word, they said "a-per-se-a," meaning, "A (the letter) by itself means a (the word)." The pronoun "I" and the letter "i" were distinguished from each other in the same manner.

Subsequently, the children were taught the symbol & to mean "and" by saying "and-per-se-and," and we went ahead and bastardized that a little bit and got the word "ampersand."

Wednesday WOLF - Raining Cats and Dogs

I'm a nerd. In fact, I'm such a big nerd that I tend to look up word origins in my spare time because I'm fascinated by our language. The odder the origin, the better. I've got a collection of random information in my brain that makes me an awesome Trivial Pursuit partner, but is completely useless when it comes to real world application. Like say, job applications.

In any case, I thought I'd share some of this random crap with you guys in the form of the new acronym-ific series. I give you - Word Origins from Left Field - that's right, the WOLF.  Er... ignore the fact that the "from" doesn't fit, and also that this first feature of WOLF is actually an idiom, not a word.

Today we'll tackle the phrase "raining cats and dogs." There are a lot of  erroneous assumptions about where we got this little gem, but the truth is that we have the same guy to thank for this as we do the outrage over eating Irish babies a little while back. Yeah, Mr. Jonathan Swift.

You might have guessed this, but big cities in the 17th and 18th centuries didn't exactly smell great. The unwashed masses... well... they were unwashed, and massing. Personal hygiene wasn't a big priority, and your neighbor's hygiene even less so. Got a full piss-pot? Toss it out the window! Done with you lunch? Throw it out the door! Did your cat die? Give her the boot!

I don't know if many people actually kept household pets back then, but the streets were overrun with strays sniffing out the garbage, and multiplying just as prolifically as the people. Crushed by carts, kicked by mean assholes, or just falling dead in their tracks of sickness and starvation, dead doggies and kitties could probably be found in streets everywhere.

And a good hard rain could run down those cobbled streets, turning it into a river and picking up all the detritus on its way, creating the image that it had actually rained cats and dogs. We probably never would have had this lovely idiom without Jonathan Swift immortalizing it in the last section of his poem, A Description of a City Shower:

Now from all Parts the swelling Kennels flow,
And bear their Trophies with them as they go:
Filth of all Hues and Odours seem to tell
What Streets they sail'd from, by the Sight and Smell.
They, as each Torrent drives, with rapid Force
From Smithfield, or St.Pulchre's shape their Course,
And in huge Confluent join at Snow-Hill Ridge,
Fall from the Conduit prone to Holborn-Bridge.
Sweepings from Butchers Stalls, Dung, Guts, and Blood,
Drown'd Puppies, stinking Sprats, all drench'd in Mud,
Dead Cats and Turnips-Tops come tumbling down the Flood.

Awesome! Who wants to go live in the Middle Ages??

Wednesday WOLF - Apostrophe

I've got a collection of random information in my brain that makes me an awesome Trivial Pursuit partner, but is completely useless when it comes to real world application. Like say, job applications. I thought I'd share some of this random crap with you in the form of another acronym-ific series. I give you - Word Origins from Left Field - that's right, the WOLF. Er... ignore the fact that the "from" doesn't fit.

Here's something interesting - because I majored in Religion in college, I learned Koine Greek so that I could read the New Testament from the source. And while that particular language has kind of slipped away from me since then (you try finding someone to speak Koine Greek with in the Midwest) I can still nail down a word or two that we've inherited in English.

One of these is a little piece of punctuation that everyone loves - the apostrophe! And what does that word mean?

If you know anything about Greek plays (and why don't you, I ask?) you know that there was a word that applied to just about everything contained therein - for example, an ode is composed of a strophe, antistrophe, and an epode. And no, there won't be a quiz later. But if you ever walk up to me in public and reiterate any little piece of knowledge I bestowed on you during the WOLF I'll be totally flattered.

What does this have to do with apostrophe? A lot, I swear.

In Greek plays, an apostrophe was when the actor addressed someone who wasn't there, whether they be offstage or simply uh... not there. Is Hamlet's speech to Yorick technically an apostrophe? Um... yeah I'm not as smart as I pretend to be so you'll have to ask someone else that question.

So what do we use an apostrophe for in English? To smash up our words, of course. "Do not" becomes "don't" - and the apostrophe stands for... the "o" that's not there. 

And while I know you're getting ready to blindside me with the ownership argument, (as in Mindy's pants) let me put it down in the ground with Yorick. Old English used "es" to denote ownership, and we dropped the pesky "e" and put in... the apostrophe to show that we went ahead and ditched the "e."