A coworker mused aloud just the other day, “Why is it we have bedroom, dining room, living room, bathroom and….. kitchen.”
Why indeed? Of course, we are simplifying things a bit too much, excluding even current room names like basement, foyer, and office, and more archaic room names like boudoir, parlor, and study. But nonetheless, why the preponderance of -rooms and the rather unique “kitchen” in our modern household terminology?
Gore Vidal once famously quipped that “‘Politics’ is made up of two words, ‘poli,’ which is Greek for ‘many,’ and ‘tics,’ which are blood-sucking insects”, and that’s perhaps one of the nicer things said about the practice and its practitioners. It seems as though politics has always been reviled, even back to the earliest statesmen.
You may or may not know that the system of numerals (from the Middle French numéral ← Latin numerālis ← numerālis (“number” or “quantity”) ← PIE *nem (“assign, distribute, allot”)) we use is the sole province of very smart people in the near East. Though our language and literary culture is dominated by the Greeks and Romans and later by western Europe, the early days of math owes just about everything to such tongue-twistable personages as Aryabhata (positional notation), Al-Khwarizmi (algebra), and Brahmagupta (zero). What’s more, our numerals are relatively straightforward transplants from the Hindu-Arabic system of numerals. Such was the influence of the East on early math and numerical theory that there was never any real competitors in Europe—the unwieldy Roman Numeral system simply couldn’t compete, lacking any real form of positional notation or zero, and being almost impossible to work with in algebra.
“Left” and “right” are such common words that we don’t often realize just how significant they are; but like all simple words, they tend to be venerable, storied, and much more interesting than it may first appear.
I was inspired to do these words because of an e-mail forward joking about “left” and “right” politics by quoting Ecclesiastes:
A wise man’s heart is at his right hand; but a fool’s heart at his left.
Codicil is known mostly as a legal term (for which see the official definition), but in practice is has come to refer figuratively to any addition or addendum, often with a quasi-scholarly connotation. Its use in English dates from the 15th century, when it came into the language from the French codicille and Latin codicillus , which referred to a short writing or small tablet (used for writing). It’s no surprise that the word’s origin is French/Latinate, since most of our legal terms come from that very source. Because French and Latin was, for a long time, the preferred language of the scholars and the judicial system after the Norman Conquest, our common words from that vocabulary Latinate almost to a one.
Codicil is a diminutive form of codex, which was Latin for both “tree trunk” and “book”, and which also gave rise to the more familiar code, initially in the form of a code of law or code of ethics, but which now refers to everything from the cheat code in Contra to the source code that I write at work.