A Geek History of Time - Episode 356 - Interview with Jess Zafaris Because She's Back With a New Book!

Episode Date: February 13, 2026

You know, the thing is, you have reached farther for less good. To be blunt, the money in tabletop games isn't great. We have to wind up with the Church of England because obvi, I'll start. I mean, you're here to be the expert, but in the appeal. That one oddly doesn't make me angry. Because, you know, who's the boss? You know what? I'm going to keep my head down and be as inoffensive as I can to many.

to everybody possible. And that's it. You want to fight? I'm going to dry hump your leg until we're friends. Of course, reminded me of that one woman that I went on a single date with who said, you know, the downside about my job is that we don't show kids drowning anymore. History of time. Where we connect nerdery to the real world.

My name is Ed Blaylock. I'm a world history teacher here in Northern California. And, you know, usually listeners of the show know that Damien and I don't know that Damien I record this on on, on, uh, at night, Friday nights or Saturday nights. And, uh, this episode for reasons it'll become clear in a minute we're, we're doing on a Sunday afternoon. And, um, so I had planned that I was going to make stew for my family for dinner, uh, tonight. And I had it all figured out. Um, and I was going to, you know, get everything chopped and thrown in the pot. And, you know, uh, I had an hour to do that. And then somewhere along the way, um, I lost,

20 minutes. And so what was supposed to be an hour-long process, I had to speed up and spend a lot of time very carefully watching so I didn't cut off a fingertip. But it's all done. My house already smells amazing, which is one of the beneficial side effects of doing this. And yeah, and I made it here basically on time. So there we go. That's me. How about you, sir? Well, I'm Damien Harmony. I'm a U.S. history and economics teacher here in Northern California and at the high school level. And today I did, you know, it's, it's one of those mundane things that you forget you should do more often. I replaced the felt pads that stick to the bottom of your chairs because I have hardwood floors. Right, right.

Yeah. And I replaced the felt pads. And the chairs all glide smoothly. And it's one of those like, you ever yawn and then your ears pop and you're like, I didn't realize. I was partially deaf. Yeah. It's the equivalent of that for furniture.

It's lovely. So check your chairs, folks. I strongly recommend mundane maintenance on things like that because turning them upside down also allowed me to tighten the screws on all of the chairs. Oh, yeah. That's important too.

Yeah. So I was embracing my inner glorious stuff on because I turn the feet up down. Man, we're not even six and them upside down. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, we have a guest, and that guest is a returning friend of the show.

She is the author of Useless etymology, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages, people in between and on either side. Please welcome back. Jess Zafaris. Jess, how are you? Hi, thanks for having me back on the show. I'm excited to be here. Also in the midst of a long stew, as a matter of fact, I'm making smoked brisket chili and my big cast ironies. iron has been on the smoker for six hours now.

Nice. Now you are, that's awesome. You are three hours ahead of us. Yes, that is true. You probably have better weather for doing that. It is,

it is quite nice today. It's a little chilly, but sunny and pretty, so it's plus. Gotcha. How, what is the weather out there? Because I'm looking at it getting up to 80 today.

And I'm not happy about it. Yeah, that's too much. It's like 50s here. It sounds so envious. I would make a piece of. Yeah. Well, we had you on last time for a different book that you had written.

And this time we've got you on for a new book that you have released. And you have been touring libraries from basically the East Coast to the Mississippi or a little short of it promoting your book, which is cool. I know somebody on a book tour. So my first question is, why the second book on etymology? Didn't you get it all done in the first book? This is actually my third etymology book, as a matter of fact. I have the kids one too.

Yeah, right. And then the, so when I was invited to write the kids book, I had been writing a blog called Useless etymology for years at that point. That's why they approached me. The publisher asked me to, they were like, Would you like to write something for kids? And I was like, I've never written anything for kids. But apparently they had found that people on Amazon were looking up word origin dictionaries for kids.

And I was like, well, sure, I'll dig a whack at it. The second time, or my second publisher, different publisher entirely. This one is John Murray Press, which is the same publisher that published Darwin and Austin. And also is the parent to the publisher Chambers, which has been publishing etymology dictionaries for about 200 years. They heard me talking about Middle English on a podcast that they were producing and asked if I would like to write a book. If I had any proposals, I sent them to one of them was useless etymology. One of them was words from hell. And they were like, we want the swear word one first.

That's good. Blood in, blood out. Yeah. I was like, fuck yeah. Let's do it. So I did that. But useless etymology is a compilation of all of my favorite etymology facts and research that I have done over the past 15. some odd years and I like it better because it is more it is more me so okay so yeah I was gonna

I do yeah go ahead I will say I have I have another etymology book coming out next year called into the words which is a an etymologist's field guide to plants animals and nature oh very nice nice so like it should be fun talk about plants that make you want to kill your father and and fuck your mother yeah of course yeah yeah Well, I was going to ask, there you go, Ed. I hate you so much. I know. These are just jokes, yasta, you know, it's fine.

You'd have to be blind not to see them. So, there he goes. You should have heard what I hit him with last night. It was good. Oh, no. I was going to ask if you were answering to a market need, but actually I'd like to know, do you think you've created a market need? I don't know.

There is, I would say there is a hunger for friendly. accessible, entertaining education. We are in a time of anti-intellectualism and vitriol and people who crave education and who grew up enjoying PBS missed this kind of stuff. Sure. So I think so. And there are other etymology creators. In fact, I think now I am officially friends with every etymology creator out there.

Nice. All right. You need to form an organization. Right? We need a coalition. Yeah. Oh, God. I'd love to see what the acronym for it would be.

be lexophiles anonymous oh there you go L.A. There's like oh they're based out of Louisiana. But nice, nice mug there, Ed. Thank you. It has, okay, so let me ask you this. Has etymology always been your passion? Is this a passion or is this like an occupation you enjoy? Like where is it on the spectrum for you? Literature and language have always been. passions. It's always been what I've been good at. In fact, I was, I took a number of language courses in high school. I focused on that in undergrad. I specifically spent time taking classes on the development of the English language from Old English to Middle English to modern English. So like Beowulf to Chaucer to Shakespeare, etc. So I have been doing this for a long time. And

when I entered the, I did my grad degree in journalism. And while I was doing the, and while I was doing the mind-numbing work of being like a recipe editor and things like that for a while in my early career as an intern at the Denver Business Journal, I would come home. And the thing that I would do for myself is look at word origins and put them on this blog that eventually became these books. Sure. Okay. This is always a thing that's your constant companion then.

Absolutely. Gotcha. Okay. Ed, feel free to break in because I have a list of questions. So how do you think social media and platforms like TikTok

have aided you down this path? Has it been an accelerant? I definitely would not have had. I don't think that I would have achieved the second, the two later book deals without it. I had the blog and I may have, but it was a smaller platform.

The kid's book was due to the blog, but at the same time as I was publishing the kid's book, I was working at Ad Week as their audience engagement director. And they were like, would you, you know, what do you think about this new TikTok thing? And I was like, I'm too old for that. But then I was like, you know, am I? I'll try it. So I started my TikTok channel at the same time as I started AdWeek's TikTok channel.

And I used them to figure out features to play with audiences to discover memes, to figure out what formats worked. So I was able to accelerate both at the same time. I tried to keep Ad Weeks like slightly ahead of mine. while I was working on that. Oh, sure. So that, you know, I'm not taking away from professional time to do this. But at the same time, both were growing and both hit around. So AdWeak hit like 150K and I hit like 100K, give or take, which worked out well.

And then if you want to, if you would consider YouTube to be social media, then that would be, I'd say that's my larger audience by now. I started a podcast called Words Unraveled with a guy named Rob Words or Rob Watts. A very fun podcast. It's been doing very well, especially on YouTube, but also across podcast platforms. And I certainly have achieved greater recognition and better book sales, I think, off of my YouTube audience than my TikTok audience. Do you think that has to do with the longer format on YouTube? I do. I also think that the parasycial relationships are a lot more because of the longer format and because it's a little more conversational.

I think the folks who follow think that we're a lot closer and we know each other a lot better on YouTube than on TikTok because they don't tend to ask quite as personal questions or speculate about my personal life quite as much. That's got to be like an interesting metric and like the intersection with got to call the cops. Like, yeah. Like, well, I'm being stalked by three, but that means book sales are going to go up by 42%. Yeah. So like, hmm. Six, seven, right? Ed hates that probably.

You know, I did. I did until I realized that it was, in fact, just dada. Uh-huh. And now I literally do not care. This is what I was saying. Yeah. Please. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, Jess, go ahead. Gen Alpha humor is, it's like walking into an art gallery and running into a smash toilet. Like, that's what it is. That is what their memes are, all of them. Yeah. Oh, my God. I haven't heard it described that succinctly that well. That's it, though.

That's pretty much it. Yeah. Well, and you mentioned smash toilet. I would actually say that this, you can trace it back to when we came back from lockdown. Because there were the TikTok challenges of destroy a bathroom. I do think that that is a through line. Like it's softened, thankfully. But like there was, but I mean, just like Dada softened in a lot of ways.

It's like that's true. You know, but I dare say though that Dada is, and maybe this is me being old and fuddy-duddy. Dadaists at least were trained in things. These kids are kind of coming by intuition. So I think it's going to end up being a little more shallow than what the Dada is. we're doing, but hopefully there won't be a worldwide conflagration that kills most of them off anyway. Yeah. Well, wait, hold on.

Wasn't Dada as an after World War I? Are you talking about World War II as the worldwide conflagration? I think Dada and World War I happened around the same time, didn't they? Well, I always understood that it was a response to the stupidity of World War I, that it was, it was not, you know, it was essentially kind of an ideological, not really nihilism, but just a, you know, know, look at the absurdity of everything around us. I think it's contemporaneous with it. Okay. All right.

I'll have to look it up. But yeah, yeah, yeah, I think, you know, in here very rarely going to hear me saying this, but in defense of gen Alpha, you know, I mean, at this point, the ones I've got in my classroom are, you know, 12 and 13 years old. So they haven't had time to get trained in anything. I think, I think there are amongst. them, the ones who are who are going to be drawn into getting into learning about, you know, classical structures and art and all that kind of stuff. And so we may see more depth out of it later on, you know, so I don't, I don't completely want to sell it short. But like right now, yeah, it is, it's, it's, you know, uh, uh, tea saucer shallow. Yeah. It is. You know,

I will say, yeah, I write about this for dictionary. dot com sometimes that they'll send me they'll send me chasing a gen alpha term so that i can write an explanation for teachers and parents and things oh my god you're doing the lord's work thank you um and i did i did six seven um which that one agreed tea saucer shallow um it's it's that it's exactly what it looks like it's a wild garden path too yeah it is exactly the one the one that i actually that made me think smash toilet in an art gallery was girding, which I don't think it's actually going to, I don't think that one's going to stick around because it was a flash in the pan kind of term, but it was short for like, it's a verb, obviously, girding.

One can gert. And originally it was a shortening of the phrase, yo, gert, as if you're saying yogurt, but Gert is a guy, some person named Gert, and you're going, yo, Gert. But later, the series of TikToks came out that were, they said they were like distorted images of wildlife, typically. And the overlay text said, Gerting is doing something very smart but also very dangerous. And again, nothing about that video described something very smart, but also very dangerous. It was just like a cheetah distorted in the background of an image. And I was like, okay, I understand this because what we're doing is we're looking at the

fact that everybody posts viral wildlife videos and we're making bad ones of those to, you know, brain rot ourselves. And we're also adding a bunch of nonsensical stuff on top. And I'm like, you know what? I get it. I mean, I don't, but I get it. Right, right. Yeah.

I see what you're trying to do and I don't understand it. Yeah. I can follow the train of thought, but it doesn't lead anywhere for me. Right. Right. Yeah. Like, I bought a ticket. I'm sitting down.

Why is there a cockroach punching my? ticket. Exactly. It's calling me Gregor. I don't get it. Okay, so you said you brought up girting. And at first I thought it was girting like you gird your loins. No, no.

Like G-U-R-T. Yeah. Now this is interesting because G-U-R-T, which I think was still tied to yogurt back in the early 90s, it meant to ejaculate to girt. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. Yep, that definitely, those are definitely connected. Not even a question.

Yeah. That's really, yeah, I find that really funny that that's a slang term that never entered any of my circles of conversation back then. And maybe it's just because, you know, in the 90s, you were in junior high school or something. Well, no, I was, I'm thinking from my freshman year of high school. So, yeah, you would have been an adult and had a mortgage by then. But, uh, gosh. Oh, damn it. But I, I overheard the more obnoxious.

Doc date rapists using that term. Oh, okay. It does feel very fortune. Like that is a logical conclusion and a decently logical use of that term. Yeah. I'm just curious as to like how it came. I love this idea that it had its time and it seems to have fizzled away. And it clearly may be even just regional because Ed lived in a different region than I,

but it could also be generational because slang you know back then too and yet it came back and it meant something thoroughly different and completely unrelated to what 30 years previously had had been still still brain rotty and masturbatory though absolutely in its nature masturbatory but not directly in its reference exactly interesting yeah yeah yeah um okay so So I you speak of being accessible and by the way, I did get a certain flash of pride when you're like, yeah, when I, you know, I started this, this thing before I got the books and all that. And I'm like, I've been following her since before her second book. And that felt kind of cool. I just lurk. Like I made some content so that kids would know that they'd found mine if they accidentally found mine. But so and I made it my type of content. So it's just nothing but terrible puns.

So that after they go like three lines deep, they're just like, this is all this guy ever fucking does. They'll lose interest and move on. So mission accomplished. But beyond that, I just lurk. And I always just like grab different things and like start following different people. Some with a morbid curiosity and some with the, I like words. And that's, you know. So just that was that was kind of cool to hear.

Yeah. Are you ever worried about becoming pedantic? I have found that the more you study etymology, linguistics, language in general, the less pedantry makes any sense or is any degree of productive. It falls apart amid the collective iterative creativity and chaos that we use to assemble languages. Language, it's always changing. Many words have completely changed meanings. The roots no longer make literal sense, like outrage, which doesn't contain outright. or rage and electricity, which means amber, all kinds of nonsense like that.

It does have rules. Like every dialect has rules, literally all languages do. But pedantry is, pedantry is selecting one dialect and saying that it's better than the other is because it's the one that the ruling class speaks and writes in. It's like taking a, like style guides are important. They make sure that all of your content that you develop as an organization or an individual sounds and looks the same and it makes sure that your editors

know what to do when they're editing your books and things like that. But it's like saying that a style guide is more correct than the way someone speaks because you don't like

the way they speak or because the person who created the style guide has more clout in the publishing industry. And that just doesn't make any sense. So I would agree. I believe that the rather I wrote

useless etymology in particular, in part, to break down the need for pedantry and instead generate an appreciation for the joyful amalgam of English. I like that. Cool. Yeah. I like that because it helps me to validate my students code switching. Like, there is a place for writing with an academic voice. But when we're discussing it, you don't have to, you know, do that.

We can, we can, you know, break it down into language that both. of us can easily understand and then let me teach you this cheat code for for written stuff you know i also like because like you you lean yourself to uh the rules being descriptive not proscriptive yes so and yeah everybody always wants me no please go ahead i was hunting in my head for that that binary descriptive prescriptive and a bunch of other terms are coming up and i was like that's not it but yeah yeah everybody wants me to like decide whether i like the oxford comma or not And I'm like, I'm sorry, my books use it, but my journalism doesn't. I can't tell you that I can't just decide to not like it for PR Daily, you know?

Sure. Yeah, I'm sorry. We're both Oxford commaists. Sorry. That's all right. I just writes for too many publications. I can't. Totally.

It's not the downfall of society when people don't use it. It just makes for really fun misunderstandings. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So it also enables me to catch students who are using AI or plagiarism bots a lot. I believe it. Yeah.

Yeah. Also, the, the, what is the phrase that they use? It's a not only X, but also YZ. Oh, no. And I'm like, you don't talk like that. I have a sample of your writing. You don't write like that. Like let's come on.

It's not this, it's that. Like, we need to stop using that as a society and let the bots have it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Don't say also like what the thing that I tell my, my clients, I'll go straight for advertising agency executives.

I'll write award entries and things like that. And whenever the thing that I tell them is not just that there I am using that exact format. The thing that I tried to tell them is you want to, your point is going to be stronger if you don't spend time telling someone what it's not. Like if you're trying to convince a judge that your ad campaign is the best ad campaign to ever ad campaign, then telling us what it isn't, isn't going to help you justify the reason for why it's awesome. It's not like it's not just an influencer marketing campaign.

It's the best influencer marketing campaign of all time. You could just say it's the best influencer marketing campaign of all time and then explain why. Yeah, it feels like we've been very Ted talkified. Uh-huh. You know. Absolutely. I'm not here just to talk to you about technology, but also education. You know, it's like, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, speaking of pedantic. Ed, do you have more? Because I was going to get into some of the meat from the book, actually. No, I'm good. Go ahead. So I got to start with, again, former Latin teacher, still teaching my kids Latin. and the word fact is such a fun word because fact comes from the Latin verb Fakio Fokura fakie factum which means to make or to do.

It's where we get words like manufacture, et cetera, et cetera, which means a fact is a thing which has been made. And in parentheses, plain. Ed, you look very confused by this. No, that's not confusion. That's my mind being blown by it. Is it cool? Yeah.

By realizing something that, you know, with my limited understanding of Latin, should have been obvious. But yeah. So, whoa. So, yeah, go ahead. It's an etymological doublet of the word feet. It is a thing done. Something accomplished.

It's very cool. It's really cool. And so when I used to teach it, I would teach the kids. It means to make or to do, and depending on context. You know, you make a fire or you, you know, and so on. on. What's really fun, though, is that the kids realize that doing is sometimes slang for sex. Yeah. And I, I, and they realize this right around the time that I'm teaching them, um, imperatives. And an, an imperative in Latin is you'd normally take the infinitive and you drop off the RE. And so it's an imperative. It's, it ends with a vowel, almost always, right? So, uh, for instance, uh, cure means run. Right. But if I'm talking to multiple, curate, right? Both y'all run, right? But Fakio is one of five verbs that does something different in the imperative. There's capio, which is to seize, turns to carpe. Right. Okay. There's duco, which means to lead, and this is where we get ducked from, by the way. And that's duke. You just like, and it's because of all of these being third conjugation verbs. So the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the.

thematic vowel that's left over when you knock off the infinitive ending is so short that it just goes away with a breath instead of duke it's duke duke duke it just turns to duke right so you can see how that would happen yeah um so uh ferre is interesting because it's in your regular and it's just fair because you knock off the re and it's just f er anyway so fair right then that means to bring or to bear or to carry okay um let's see and deca right exactly where you're going this Yes. And Dikera turns to Dik, because Dik, Dik, right? So, and that means to say. And that's where we get Dictator and dictum and stuff like that, right? Fokera turns to fuck. There it is.

And these baby little freshmen every year, I would be like, no, no, no, it's not fack, it's fuck. And I would just go straight face with it. I'm like, it's fuck. You got to say. So, like, when you're translating and when you're reading this out loud, you have to say fuck because that's proper pronunciation. fuck and they're like and now the plural is fuck it take right which you know do with that as you will but then the kids yeah but then the kids start making the

connection of wait fuck that sounds like I'm like I know to do I remember in my sophomore year yeah sophomore year of college my buddy Nick was taking Latin

kind of as part of his philosophy minor. I don't know. I didn't get the logic behind it, but he was taking Latin, and he would not shut up. We were 19, 20, and he would not stop repeating the phrase from class the week they went over it,

Skintilla Panfakiat. And just giggling, just, just, just giggling constantly. And I'm like, Skintilla did the bread. Oh, and I'm like, Dude.

We're not a junior high school. He made the bread. It's different. Yeah. Yeah. But whatever. Yeah. That's fun.

That's. Yeah. Oh, boy. Yeah. Well. But yeah, there's a few verbs that are actually, I like more than Fakio Fakra, but very few. My absolute favorite is Paratragueedo, which literally, it's a really long fucking verb.

It's paratragueedo, paratraguehada. Ah, we at tur. It's a very standard first conjugation. It means to complain in a self-pitying and pompous manner. Useful. Yeah. You know, the specificity of verbs in language can tell you a lot about the society it came from. Indeed.

Well, and then you like, if you look at the word, it's spells similar to the word tragedy. Right. And then Parra, it's clearly a borrowed word from Greek. Yeah. But the Romans still used it And I would use to like once the kids learned all 132 forms of the verb I would have them do this week long exercise of I give them 11 verbs And they have to give me all 132 forms of every verb

And I made sure to give them paratrojagoa And the kids would start complaining because they're having to write the whole goddamn thing out And you know if you get to like the second person plural you know, imperfect, subjunctive, passive. You know, it's paratragoe da, bahmini. And you're just like, yeah. And they would start complaining. I'm like, oh, wait until you look up what it means.

And if they got any part of the verb wrong on that 132, I would circle the, even if it was just one part, I would circle that one part and give them no credit for it. and I let them redo things. So now they're induced to redo it, and that means all 132 forms again. It's, you know, it was devious. Wow. Yeah.

Yeah. Boy, they were fucked. Just. Totally tangential, but the Greek word for, by the time it hit Latin, it did, meant like complaining or something like that, right? But the Greek word for tragedy means, I mean, in the Greek predecessor to the word tragedy means goat song. And the notion is like the goats probably came into play with the ditharam, the hym sung to

Dionysus, which was the predecessor of tragedy and usually included a chorus made up of people dressed as satyrs. That makes a lot of sense. Consider it theater was tied to pan and fertility as well and stuff like that. There's a Greek word that means so steep that not even a goat. could climb it. Seems useful. Yeah.

It makes sense being an island culture with, you know, goats. And somebody pointed out, you mean it means goat forsaken, which. That's great. It's like, oh, that's terrific. So, yeah. I wish I'd taken more ancient Greek because there's so many good words in ancient Greek. Like just going through the various numbers of people who could divine and what they use

to divine, there's a cheese diviner. Yeah. like amazing that's yeah so yeah yeah yeah i had fun talking to my students the other day about just how deeply superstitious the greeks and the rowans were oh yeah yeah uh all all of this talk is is reminding me of of the crash course in goat song that i got uh my junior year we we uh had a guest director in my drama department and we did a production of antigone and he basically put us through a Cook's tour version of the course in ancient Greek theater that he had completed like three semesters before at San Diego State.

And it would have been fascinating if he hadn't been an arrogant prick. So my memory of all of that stuff is unfortunately colored by that. I'm having flashbacks, but... Oh, no. But, Jess, it sounded like you were about to say something I didn't mean to step on your toes. Not at all. I am bad about interrupting, but my family, my spouse's family is Greek. My name is a smash up of an Irish name and a Greek name that I wedged together because

of coincidence, as a matter of fact. But the, I really, I am hoping that we can spend a little more time in Greece so that I can learn a little bit more about the language because currently the folk. who live in L.A., his extended family, don't speak very much Greek. Yeah, as happens after generations. Right. Yeah. So, hey, can you reiterate the, in your book, you talk about the ratio of nouns to verbs.

Oh, yeah. Can you reiterate that, bring us up to date on that, and then maybe explain why you think that is? Yeah, absolutely. So I discussed this in my discussion of back formations in particular, and this is. a good example because a number of a lot of verbs that end in A-T-E entered English after the T-I-O-N version, and usually it's that the T-I-O-N version either came directly from Latin or as a noun from Old French, ultimately from Latin.

And one reason verbs are often back formations in English is because after the Norman invasion, a whole lot of words entered English from, like I've said, French and Latin. And in some cases, they were rearranged to fit existing structural rules in English. But there are, to get to the point, there are about three times as many nouns as verbs. And it's typically because we often have need of nouns before we have needs of verbs to go with them. You can do a lot with make, go, do, carry, et cetera. You're helping verbs and your base verbs can do a whole lot of work without needs for more specific. ones, but you need more nouns. Once you learn about more objects, more ideas, more functions,

then you have to have a noun to go with them, and then later you come up with the creative verb to go with it. But sometimes there was a corresponding verb already in Latin or French that we like borrowed in one way. And one of my favorite examples of that is the word is the difference between destroy and destruct, because destruct is a back formation of destruction, but destroy had already existed since the era, since old French, that R-O-Y ending is very French. But destruction also came in around the same time with that Latin, T-I-O-N ending. The noun or the verb destruct didn't exist until Mission Impossible coined the term self-destruct. Yeah.

Yes. It's one of my favorites. Really? Yeah. Yes. Because destroy. I mean, we don't say like I destructed something. We say, I destroyed it.

Right. And you would talk about the destruction. Uh-huh. But there's no need to destruct. Because we. Yeah. And so actually, it kind of has to come in as a reflexive verb. Uh-huh.

One of my favorite pieces of like historic pedantry, too, is with resurrect and resurrection. Because resurrect is in like, I want to say, 19th century back formation of resurrection. And pedants around the time. insisted that the verb was resurge because the Latin now or the Latin verb is, exactly, and that created resurrection ultimately. So, Ed, to bring you up on that. So a verb, in Latin, there's four parts of any verb. Okay.

Typically, right? There will be exceptions. But surgo surgo surrogura, surrexi surrectorum. So it was not even a transitive verb. You could tell by its fourth principal part that it was not meant as a transitive verb. it morphed over time, but re-surgo, ray is to go back and do or to do again or to do in a form of repairing even. Okay.

So re-surgo, re-surgura, re-surexi, resurecturum. And then it became that, which was, so it does turn into a transitive when you put the ray in front of it, which is interesting. So then it was a resurectum. And so resurrection came from that verb. And so what she's pointing to is that the pedants were like, no, it came from this verb therefore the proper term is research not resurrect oh yeah well that's that's why proscriptivism is kind of bullshit right exactly that doesn't that doesn't that doesn't

roll off the tongue. Yeah. It doesn't. Yeah. Yeah. That doesn't work, man. Yeah. Or better yet.

We found something that works already and we're using that. Right. Because I have always said that language is inherently lazy. Yeah. That's why destroy versus destruct. Exactly. Yeah. Actually, so in Latin, there's the verb,

Ago Agra, Egi, Actum. It's where we get act from, actor, all those. Okay. Also, we get the word agenda. from this. Yeah. Because it's a gerundiv. Also agent?

Yes. One who does. So all these kinds of things, right, agency, the concept up. Yeah. Ago Agra simply means to do whatever the thing that you're, what you're using is. So if you use Ago Agra and somebody's in the Senate, they're debating. If you use Ago Agra and somebody's in a chariot, they're driving. If you use Agu-Agra and you're in a battle, you're stabbing.

Like it just, it's smurf. It's all it is. It's verb smurf. Oh, wow. Yeah. That explains why it has so many derivatives. Yeah, partly, yeah, because again, you have the need. And again, language is lazy.

But this goes back to what Jess was saying. Like, I do Senate stuff. Oh, okay, we know what you're doing. You know, so it's just, yeah. I'm going to do a politics. I mean, yeah, go ahead. I talk about this in the book. Colocation is that there are lots of pairs of words that have strong collocation,

which means we put them together and we use them together. And sometimes there's no reason in particular for that verb to go with that noun. And like, due time means to spend time in prison specifically. And everyone who speaks English understands that. But if you were, if you did not speak English, then you would be like, why, why does that specifically mean go to prison? Spend time in prison. Go astray. Make a difference.

Take a seat. Have sympathy. Feel free. Keep in touch. The, the verb there doesn't necessarily need to be that verb. It can be a number of them. Yeah. What was it?

There was something that was, oh, well. It got lost. No, I'm sorry. No, it's fine. Yours is better. Can you tell me about the ampersand? Now, as somebody who struggled with cursive writing, it's just an S, capital S turned backwards is what it looks like. If you look at like a capital S, it's the ampersand backwards.

Now, D&D has made it very, very common for us all now. But what the hell? Like I've heard tell that it was actually part of the alphabet song at one point and it was used at the end and per se. And then and then there's a C that gets put after it sometimes. So go crazy on the ampersand, please. Gladly. And if you look at older versions of the ampersand, like early manuscripts, the instances in which it appears, it's a lot more obvious that it is what it is. It's a ligature of the letter E and the letter T stylized to get.

almost in the same equally illogical at face value but makes more sense when you look at its history as the the German double S symbol. Okay, it looks like a B. Yeah, right, exactly, but it's not a B. It's two S's. Anyway, it is, it means and. You know that that it means and. It's Roman shorthand version of et, which means and.

And the English word ampersand arose in the mid-1800. it's a contraction of and per se and. So you have to have the end on the end. It can't just be and per se and, which means the character and by itself is and. It's very convoluted. And an earlier contraction recorded in the 1700s was empathy. So it's always been sort of a smashy word.

A collection of letters that more or less means and per se and. And the reason for the long name is because the symbol was also used as part of other shorthand. an early symbol for et cetera, here we go, which is Latin, which is Latin for, and the others was an ampersand followed by the letter C.

So et cetera is an ampersand with the letter C at the end. So people had to clarify that the word ampersand meant the ligature symbol for and or et by itself without anything else attached to it, like, et cetera. And yes, it is silly.

My other favorite silly one of these, as far as like typographic symbols go, is the paragraph symbol, the pill crow, which it looks like a little P. Yeah, exactly. And I want to make sure that I get the details on this, right? So paragraph means to write beside. And in the 17th century, as printing technology advanced, the word came to refer to actual breaks in the flow of text, but it was originally a mark you would put next to text.

Because, you know, if you're filling up a whole page, the paper is expensive. You got to, you know, this is a line break. I'm not actually going to line break. Yeah, yeah. The paragraph symbol is called the Pilcro, and the Pilcro is a mangled version of the word paragraph. So in old French, pellograph was a variation of the word paragraph, and this variation was misunderstood in English as Pilcro, which was then corrupted into Pilcro.

So Pilcro and Paragraph mean the same thing. So it went from one kind of bird to another. Exactly. Wow, that's, and then there's like the T with the thing. It's the Thorn, I think. Yeah, yeah. The F and Thorne are two different T.H. letters, which I think we should at least have one of them.

Yeah. Like, we should. Thorn makes sense to me. Yeah. Thorne ought to still be in our language as a letter for a compound sound. Yeah. Yeah. There's no reason we need two letters for that.

No, no. Yeah. And it would make, it would make phonics education so much easier on the kids. Absolutely. Really would. Like just add a letter makes spelling like 15% easier. Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, wow. Yeah. That, what one letter could you add that would do that? I think, yeah, I mean, we just found the answer,

but like I just love the idea of that kind of a question. Like, yeah, what little tweak would you make? It's like that episode we did where, you know, change one thing about a character and it would improve the movie by 30% and you wouldn't have to change any of the writing,

you know? Yeah. Wait. Can I hear what one of those was? like a top level highlight from that. Oh, sure. Actually, I can also listen to the whole episode. You will, I assume. But I said make Finn for sensitive.

And so suddenly everything makes more sense. He's more dialed in on people's pain than you could have Leah. And literally, I'm only adding seven minutes to the trilogy total. And suddenly it all makes more sense. Leia could explain to him, you know, my brother is more of a warrior. I was more of like I could sense things about people. That's why I went into politics. She's like, I've heard of people who could just pull themselves through the vacuum of space.

And like you could just write explanations into it and stuff like that. And so now you've got a dyad between Finn and Ray. Finn keeps finding people who are suffering. That's how he dials in and he can do the healing. Whereas Ray like tries to heal and it takes something out of her. He's like, no, let me try. And then he could actually repair Poe's arm and it wouldn't be. stupid um just all kinds of like and that was just one of them you know it was uh i really yeah i had

i had fun with that episode so yeah that is fun yeah so all right so uh i've done this word in our um in in in our podcast before the word dashboard is one of my favorite words you spent two entire episodes on it if i remember correctly it might be yeah yeah yeah if you really fucked that one very well. Heck yeah. It was done and done. It was fachtumed hard. Which, by the way, the word factotum actually comes from that.

Is a guy who does everything for you. You know, it's My Man Friday. So dashboard on a computer. Is that an example of a skeomorphic language occurrence? Yeah. And so is the car dashboard too, because the dashboard was originally the board or the apron in front of a carriage to stop mud from being splashed. So literally mud is dashing against it.

And so even in motor vehicles, it is also skeuomorphic. And then, of course, it was appropriated for computers as well. Yeah. Because the area where the dashboard would have been became a console of information as well, the dials and the gauges and stuff like that. And then that's the part that carried forward. My favorite word, oh, what's that? I mean, in a car, you would hope that nothing dashes against the dashboard.

Hopefully not your head in particular. And then you could argue that maybe the mouse, the cursor dashes against the dashboard on your laptop. But I don't think that that's intentional. Yeah. Well, and I don't think they use that word anymore for computers either, do they? Yeah, I don't know. Yeah. Because I remember, like, it was back when widgets were a thing.

So it was, you know, and they literally had dials that made it look like it was part of the car. So. Oh, that's funny. Yeah. Okay, so just by the way, my favorite word in the entire English language is bedroom. Because it's the only room in the house that its very name tells you exactly what's in there. Like if you go in and they're like, oh, yeah, it's the bedroom up on the right. And you walk into a room and it's empty.

You're like, am I in the right room? Because you're expecting to see a bed there. Right. Technically, I'm in a bedroom, but there's not, there's no bed in it. So it's, oh, I'm in an office. now. Exactly. Exactly, right. Kitchen doesn't do that. Living room doesn't do that because that's literally the front parlor, which is ironically where Irish people would put the dead body for awake, so it's not a living room. And you, you know, there's literally no other room. The bathroom doesn't

even work because, you know, you have one and a half baths. Oh, okay, now you know that there's a bathroom that doesn't have a bath in it. So, you know, it's not a restroom either because, you know, there's no resting necessarily. But I have a fun story about this. One of my favorite influencer connections, like internet friends that I've ever made is Ben Silver and the way we met is very funny. He made a TikTok that he thought was perfectly, obviously satirical where he, someone asked the question like, you know, why are bathrooms called bathrooms if they

don't always have baths in them? And the answer is more mundane than what he said. it's just sometimes there's a bath in it sometimes you bathe in it things like that right but he said he said all bathrooms are named after elizabeth bathery who was a figure of like early plumbing and parlors and things and like he thought he was being satirical everybody everybody who gave this more than a second's thought believed it to be satire but a bunch of people didn't a bunch of people were like oh my god i can't believe that's true. And so I got tagged into his video. People were like, oh my God, can you confirm this? And I was like, okay, and this is very funny. And one of the reasons it's funny is because it reminded me of H.L.

Manken, who is the sage of Baltimore, this like early, okay, you're historians, you know, you know. Yeah, yeah. Brilliant guy wrote a bunch of funny stuff and also really good journalism and also a bunch of questionable stuff as well. But... Hunter F. Thompson of his time. Exactly. But he was also the orchestrator of the great bathtub hoax in which he convinced a significant portion of New York

that bathtubs didn't exist until the 1800s. Yeah, that sounds like him. Yeah. And it was a big deal at the time. So it reminded me of that. But now I'm friends with Ben and this guy who posted this. It was very funny. I made a response video talking about it.

It was great time. Anyway, bedrooms. Yeah, yeah. Named after a Nancy bedroom, actually. Indeed. Yeah. Why do you think word coinage has been accelerating? Oh, internet.

Yeah, just so kind of like, I guess if I was to ask this question 120 years ago, we would have said cinema. Yeah, cinema, telephones, things like that. Radio, television. Well, 120 years ago, it just would have been cinema, right? Like, because that's 1905. We're not getting radio. But yeah, I see. Over time.

Yeah. Yes. And so 200 years ago, it would have been, oh, novels. Also things like trains. You can get quicker. You can get from one place to another more quickly. Yeah. Okay.

So just more, I don't want to say homogenization, but I do want to say like more mass media that we all have in common. Easy access to other thoughts. easy access to other people, conversational. Also, like, you know, you could argue high capacity production printing, too. If you can produce more newspapers, more people can read them and more people can pick up phrasing. Have you? Oh, go ahead. So essentially, it strikes me as being that the rate of, you know, when you look at mutation in biological organisms, you know, you have the life cycle of an organism and

how rapidly you go through generations. And so with each one of these leaps, it's a memetic increase in the rate of generation jumping. Like we get more generations of iteration of this idea in a more compressed time frame. And so that leads to this kind of massive, you know, opening of the first X-Men movie, you know, lines going off into space, you know, mutation kind of, you know, picture. going on. So and and do you see or do you think, Jess, that there's any, any direction in which, like is, do you think this, this curve is going to continue climbing

kind of exponentially like forever? Or do you think there's a point at which like possibilities will be exhausted and we'll see like a plateauing? I think that's difficult to say. I think that our capacity for sharing ideas and phrases and knowledge will not decrease. I don't know what the critical mass of people, I don't know where lies the critical mass of people communicating with each other, where at what point are we the most connected we ever can be, if that makes sense. At one point, I mean, you know, a few years ago, anybody who was on Twitter could partake in the, dialect of Twitter speak.

Now, all the kids who are on Roblox can communicate about Roblox in their own dialect, Gen Alpha can create memes that spread very quickly. But I don't know, like, are we now as connected as we ever going to be? Is there going to be another means of sharing mass ideas at a larger scale? And I think possibly so. I think the next biggest barrier is to make it easier for people. who speak different languages to communicate fluently with each other

in online spaces. So however that is achieved, I think that will be, then we can more easily adopt like Indian memes and Chinese memes and things like that, which happens in some spaces, but not frequently. Like I am always surprised to see what Disney character is popular in Japan

versus here. Sure. Which like, there's a cult of Pluto and Donald Duck over there, whereas over here, it's more like the frozen characters and things like that. I'm just thinking about Halloween costumes, my students wear every year, that kind of thing, and how that changes. And how in many ways there's a couple markers of cultural shifts that I've noticed at the high school level. One is Halloween.

The other is prom and ball. So prom and ball set your pallets in a lot of ways. but they also set your style obviously, right? And it's largely the gals, but the guys are starting to catch up too. They're starting to doll up in different ways. It's not just you have a tux and your arm candy for the lady.

But Halloween, I saw this year, I'm trying not to date the podcast, so I'm just going to speak of Halloween in terms of it has passed. I saw this year a lot more queen of hearts and a lot more boys dressing as goofy. Huh. Interesting. Yeah.

That all seems very vintage. It does. It does. And I don't know what's going on there because the Queen of Hearts is a horrible person. And Goofy is the only Disney character that we know canonically has fucked. So, because he's a dad. True. Right.

Right. Yeah. And so. There's 100% confirmation he has to have at least once. Exactly. Yeah. And we also now. have confirmed that he's a dog so we know what style.

And so. You know, I saw that one. But also, like, originally it was a cow, right? No, it wasn't. That's the thing. I was wrong about this and had to correct myself on another iteration of our podcast was. Oh, good. I'm learning.

Yeah, it turns out he was patterned after, I believe, Dizzy the dog. And so I thought he was a cow as well because look at his face. I was all about the phenotypical aspect. of him and I was completely wrong because he was in fact patterned after Dippy the dog I think Yeah, yeah, there's a dog that it's it's what do you call illiterative name But yeah, turns out he's been a dog this whole time which of course then brings back all kinds of questions of Is he the petite bourgeoisie? Is he the working class? Does that make Pluto's lump and Proletariat like what's going on here? Like you know does he have super sort of serum? What are you talking?

about lump and proletariat. He doesn't have to be a criminal. He could just be homeless, you know. Right. Well, an enslaved individual. It's just, it's all kinds of problems,

you know. Mickey did, in fact, enslaved people. So, but, but yeah, I just, you know, so of course,

you know, in other spaces, I didn't do this at work because I like to keep my job, but in other spaces, somebody tried to ask once. It was, I was on a game show back in the COVID times.

And they asked, they're like, okay, fuck Mary Kill. Mickey, Pluto, and Donald. Or not Pluto. Mickey, Goofy and Donald. And I was like, well, you kill Donald immediately, right?

And you marry Mickey because he's rich. But you got to give it to Goofy. And they're like, why. And I was like, because again, he's the only one knows how to. And they're all laughing. And the song came into my head. And I just, I said it. And everybody, like, you hear the audio just spike and then shut off.

Because of what I said, I was just like, face down, ass up. that's the way I like to heal and so yeah yeah it was it was a it was a good show that night yeah I forget anything else that happened but but anyway

yeah go ahead I'm also seeing so two two characters probably contributing to the goofy cow mythos is horace horse collar who was a horse who looks a lot like goofy but has has two nostrils instead of a dog nose in 1929 cartoons. And then of course, Claribel Cow,

who also looks rather like goofy, but has its horns. Right. Yeah. His ears are much more like either Dippy or Dizzy. I forget his name. But, and yeah, and the tail that he has and stuff like that. There was, yeah. I also, I had done some research on the Disney strike because I'm fun at parties.

And there was some discussion of goofy in there as well. So excellent. Yeah. So, but that's interesting that they really like Donald and and Pluto over there. I wonder what it is at Euro Disney. Oh, that's a good question. Yeah. Investigations are in order.

Yeah. Yeah. So, hey, when did goat stop meaning dipshit and started meaning like the greatest of all time? Like it used to be, I'm the goat. I'm a disappointment. And now it's I'm the goat. and I have my own theories to when this is, but I would love to hear your take on this. I mean, it's got to be when it became an acronym, which, I mean, I would say that's got to be the last, like, 30 years or so, give or take.

I think the goat emoji really solidified it. Yeah. Okay. And then I think when sportscasters started using it, too, it became, everybody started being aware of it. But I'd say it's probably at least like 20, 30 years old, too. So that fits with my theory. There was in Sacramento, they used to do like the trials to get into the Summer Olympics for track and field. I guess because it's like if you can make it in the heat of Sacramento, you can make it anywhere.

I don't know. It's not that humid here. So there's possible reasons. But one of the sprinters, he was like the best sprinter or like he and this other guy were neck and neck. He had a tattoo on his bicep. And it said G-O-A-T with dots in between. And that was early 2000. So that had to have existed.

Yep. So I wonder if he didn't like, he might not have been the originator, but he was the codifier. Yeah. Yeah, I can see that. Or part of the codification process. Yeah. So, okay. So that's relatively new because now, because again, you, you, if you know any baseball history,

you know that there's the curse of the Cubs. And I guess I'm just the goat, you know, because literally a guy tried to bring his goat into the game. And they said no. And so the Cubs didn't win a World Series until like 10 years ago. Yeah. Goat has been mostly an insult for most of its life. Right. He does smell bad.

But also just like the religious aspect of having a goat around too is that's the Judas goat. Right. That's what we're going to send off into the woods to carry all of our sent to the end of the year. Exactly. You know, it's a new year we're going to kick it out. Yeah. As it were. Yeah.

And I, oh, damn it, I had something and I lost it. All right. Got lonely and left. All right. So I absolutely loved that you played with Chiasmus. And I'm just going to read straight from your book. I hope you don't mind the, this is a teaching podcast, so I think this is fair use. But if not, you're right here and you can tell me, shut up.

It's also an ad for my book, so please, by home means. There you go. Your book, which is available, all the places you can. can get books. Useless Etymology. Chiasmus is a rhetorical device based on a Greek word

meaning shape like the letter X, which let's just appreciate the Greeks for a second there. Because Kai, right? It's when you take the grammatical structure of one sentence and reverse it but then change the words like John Milton, Paradise Lost,

love without end and without measure grace or Shakespeare. But oh, what damned minutes tells tells he or who dotes yet doubts doubts suspects yet strongly loves. So you've yeah, I've always said it's like they you have like a mirrored parallel

structure going toward the middle of the sentence. Yes. And in Latin I love the shit out of that because in Latin you could mix up the word order and you could do this anytime you want but there are times where it happens like in the Aeneid where it's just beautifully done because the words, what I used to love teaching kids

is like the first 80 lines of the I need it. I'm like, it will be hard and confusing, and it's because the words are doing what the words are saying, because you join him in the middle of a storm. And then once Neptune comes in and calms everything down, you suddenly are able to understand everything a lot better, right? Oh, I like that explanation. That would have helped me a lot.

Oh, I work cheap. But I always loved that you could create a chasmus so that you could have enemies facing, off and meeting each other where you have their weapons in the sentence. That's fantastic. It's so much fun. Yeah. So I just,

I love that you played with Chiasmus. And in this particular book, you played a lot more with what I would call the AP literary terms of the literary devices. They're fun to play with. Yeah. Yeah, they are. All right. How did you come up with these words that you featured in this book?

Like, obviously you had your ongoing blog. but you did words from hell. So that took out most of the naughty words, right? It did. Yeah. So I stripped out some of those. Is this just what you had left? Or was there stuff you wanted to make sure you included, stuff that you were like, I'm going to save that for later because dematically it works better?

Obviously, you're going to do one with plants and animals, flora and fauna. But like how did you come to this? So this book's trying to do like three things. One of them is just point out fun, funny word shit. The other is trying to, it's called useless etymology, but obviously I do not think that is the case because I wrote a book about it. But it is meant to point out the utility of etymology in improving literacy, improving creative precision in creating your, in crafting your authorial voice elements like that. And then it also is meant to, as I've said, dismantle some of the pedantry while also celebrating the patterns that you didn't notice come to life. So I have a lot of that. The first half of the book is primarily like the look at this weird funny stuff that happens a lot and you didn't even see it coming or look how silly it is that this doesn't make sense anymore. But isn't that also fun? The second half of the book is a collection of just fun, awesome words and things you, connections you never made. roots that have funny stories behind them and then collections of of wordplay so you get your

paraprosdokians your unusually long words things like that yeah i i really like because there's such reading through it there is such a joy to it like there is a and and i don't think anybody could have done it exactly like that i think that you you have a singular talent there your enjoyment of it is is obvious in talking to you, but it's also obvious in the way that you write. The excitement like bounces the words off the page to the reader. And that's really, that's,

I don't know that that can be taught. So well done you. But like it makes it even more accessible because you know that the person writing about it loves what they're writing about. So that's really cool. That's the best review I've gotten so far. So thank you very. very much. That's what I was hoping to accomplish and I'm glad I did.

Mission absolutely accomplished. The 12 people who listen to us are really going to, you know, love that with you. I'll invite my 12 people to and we'll have 24. Well, see, this will, yeah. I mean, you know, we're big in Austria, but like you're big throughout. So hopefully this will get more eyes on our only audio podcast. So do people send you words in etymological quirks now? Like all the time. Okay.

Like all the time. Via DM via email, I get, I get probably about five emails a day across my various email platforms. And sometimes people just want to share stuff. Sometimes people have questions. Sometimes they want to share a totally made up origin that absolutely isn't correct. especially with idioms. Everybody always wants idioms to have like the zaniest possible like aha moment.

And sometimes it's just like, no, I'm sorry. It's just silly. Yeah, I actually, so we did a episode. I think it was right around the time I first reached out to you. And so I think I went ahead and plowed through with the episode anyway. It just had to edit a few things out because you were like, no, no, it's this thing. I'm like, well, there goes that paragraph. But one of them was the terms, what was it, the blood is thicker than water.

And the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the birth. And how made up that was and how like I traced it back and I got back to like 1911 and then earlier. And it turns out like, no, it actually does like that desire to invert it was all. made up and it's not real and while fun it actually does mean the thing that people used to use it for so no you're not smarter for knowing the origin because the origin's not true yeah and there's been several yeah there have been several things that have been like that that there's like oh damn because you know my ideology leads me to liking certain you know phrases more than others and yeah didn't you know so everybody really wants the phrase

break a leg to mean something other than like, I hope you do something terrible so that you actually have a nice performance. It's like, it's like reverse wishing someone like. I mean, it's supposed to be exactly what you think it is. It is exactly what you think it is. You're telling someone to break their leg so that they'll actually have a great performance.

Otherwise, you'll jinx them or something like that. That's it. I really wish that it was any of the other explanations because there are like 30 of them. so so okay so the so the explanation that it was something that you would say uh before performing for a royal audience as in go out and and curtsy or bow is sorry that's oh darn all right just none of the others fit chronologically like unfortunately it is like absolutely like they're at least as far as the evidence we have on hand it's the the leg is not a piece of the stage the

the curtseying is not breaking your leg. It's just not tied to reviews. It's bad juju stuff. That's what it is. Okay. Well, Ian, you know what? I'm personally fine with that as a, you know, partial semi-theater kid.

But I guarantee. I claim to have been a theater kid, Bishop, his friend of the show Bishop is going to get on me. We had a long conversation about how I'm a dilettante. But anyway. You might get like 12 emails from people listening to this because they will be like, no, no, I guarantee it is this explanation because that's the one that I have committed to my heart and soul. And these are the five places I have seen it repeated

because the like the other explanations are repeated frequently. And they make sense, but I wish, I wish any of them are true. So off the top of your head, what, what era does break a leg date from? How, how early is that? There were there were equivalents in Greek theater. That's, this is one of the reasons we relatively know is because wishing someone bad luck in order to achieve good luck on stage is as old as theater yeah and remember see now i love it i okay i don't need any other explanation just the fact that it goes all the way it well and remember theater was a religious exercise yeah right so there's there are a number of stories old fables old myths uh of a guy having such good luck that a king kicks him out of his court because he's like i don't want to be

around when the gods turn on him. Yeah. Like there's a guy who he lost his wedding ring and he caught the fish that swallowed it. And it was like a big fish and stuff like that. And I think the Pharaoh kicked him out or something like that. Like I've heard iterations of that story before. But like there's a whole thing about like there was cursing the bride and groom on their wedding night. Yeah.

So it absolutely ties back to those cultures that also gave us, you know, Western theater as we know it. I'd be curious to finding out if it existed in Japanese and Indian theater as well. I mean, there are equivalents of wishing people bad luck in order to achieve good luck across tons of contexts. Right. Yeah. Trying to avert the evil eye. That there is some force out there that is malevolent and envious. Yeah.

And if you are too blessed or people are giving you too good a time, you're going to get zapped. Exactly. If you walk into a situation saying this is going to go perfectly, of course it's going to go wrong, right? Murphy's Law, right? Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, we have that too. Anything can go wrong, we'll go wrong. Like, you know, that kind of thing.

Or Coles Law, thinly sliced cabbage. Like, it's all basically the same thing. So. Sturgeon's law, 90% of everything is crap. I thought, I thought Sturgeon's law was don't eat the carp. I don't like you right now Right now So can you tell us about Mondagreens

Mondagreens? Mondagreens, these are very funny So Mondagreens are They're melapropisms or egg-corans The result from misheard song lyrics So the one that always got me as a kid was Shania Twain's This Kiss Which I was certain was a song about biscuits

And that doesn't match up with dietary needs at the time. Everybody was anti-carbs when Shania Twain was out. Well, I was six. Okay, fair. This six. This six. Or like trying to make sense of Latin lyrics and in religious songs. Like, who is Chelsea and why does she have a dayo?

Or in Excel sheets. Yeah, exactly. But these were named by Sylvia Wright, who wrote in Harper's magazine that she had misheard the lyrics to the Scottish ballad, the Bonnie Earl of Moray. They have slain the Earl of Moray and laid him on the green. And she thought it was Lady Mondegrine and wondered who the slain lady had been. Poor Lady Mondegrine. Oh, I love it. Um, my, Ed, what's your favorite misheard?

We've done an episode on misheard lyrics. We have done an episode on misheard lyrics. Um, I'm trying to think. Uh, oh, uh, Africa by Toto, uh, for years, for years from the time I was, I was a kid hearing it first on the radio until into adulthood. Um, there's nothing that a hundred men on Mars could make me. That's great. I mean, it fits with the song. It doesn't it?

It does. It makes sense. You know, yeah. Okay, so the standard one everybody normally names is, excuse me while I kissed this guy. Right. Yeah. Right.

Jimmy Hendricks started fucking with his rhythm section by singing that at concerts, which is awesome. Excellent. Excellent. The one that I enjoy the most probably, it's not my favorite, but I enjoyed the most, is because it changes, like you don't need to miss hear any other lyrics in the song, but it changes the whole tune of it, is there's a bathroom on the right. Yes.

Because now everything that he's singing about sounds like his guts are just doing backflips, and he's about to, you know, because it's do, do, do, do coming out of that. I was fully, fully convinced by, intentionally by my father that those were the actual lyrics. That's funny That's funny There's the bathroom on the right Yeah You know

And also like people told me the real lyrics And I was like What is that mean? Right It obviously has to be the bathroom This is consistent Yeah This makes sense

Yeah So the one that my daughter regularly teases me about Because she heard it So long time ago My daughter was just learning to write Okay And she wrote the letter

I five times and she says dad what is that and I said well that's that's like it's either E or it's I I I I I I I I I I I and she's like no but what does it spell I honey it's just she's brand new she sees her brother writing and he's making sense of stuff you know and stuff like that and so finally I just I I had Alexa play crazy train yeah yeah and uh knew that was where we were going I I yeah um and she was so mad and It was wonderful. And then we're saying, you know, she's hearing the song and I'm kind of singing it along, you know. And until that day or until many days later, because she comes around to correcting me later, was, I'm going after a real tiny crazy train. That's what I thought it was.

And it turns out it's I'm going off the rails on a crazy. That makes so much more sense. Doesn't it though? But I'm going after a real tiny crazy chain. I was like, okay, he's chasing something like that doesn't matter. He's lost. Like, I had to make it make logical sense because it didn't make any sense to me that he's, I'm going after a real tiny crazy train.

Yeah, okay. And so she's like, why do you make fun of the song like that? I was like, what are you talking about? Talking about. This is awesome. And she had to explain. So it was. There's a big, there's a big Taylor Swift one right now that, like, has become a meme.

It's the got a long list love of ex lovers. And it's because she hits the rhyme scheme ends up making her hit, like, got a long list of ex lovers. And people think it's got to love these Starbucks lovers. I mean, that fits with her. I mean, you know, look at her fan base. Yeah. Yeah, wow.

Yeah, Mondagreens. I love it. I kind of want to create a character now who's like, A chaos sorcerer. Yeah. You know, Father Mondagrine. You know, just have him screw up the hymns. All right.

So what is your favorite antiquated word? Oh, the one that immediately and always comes to mind is going to be Balter, which is a middle English word for dancing gracelessly. It's in the death of Arthur and a number of works as far back as like the 1300s, which is great. I also like litibulate, which is first recorded in these. 1600s, which means to hide in a corner from La Terre to conceal and then Boulom, which is just like a place. And then brain locker was a French, sorry, an old English word for head and it means brain locker. There were also, I don't remember the actual words. The ban locker, I think it was a word for your rib cage too, which is like body locker.

Right. Which is fun. And it has like kenning energy, right? Right. Yeah, very, very powerful. Canning Energy, yeah. Yeah. Just for everyone else who's listening,

Kenning is? It's an old English compound word that alludes to other things. So instead of saying, calling the sea, the sea, you could call it the Whaleweg, the Whales Way, or you could call the,

you could call it the sail road or the whale road, things like that. Sure. The often repeated, but also often contested one is Beowulf's name, which means bee wolf and is said to mean bear, according to Tolkien and a couple of other translators, but it may or may not actually mean that.

Gotcha. And other examples are things like in the sagas, in Old Norse, we hear of arrows being referred to as wound bees. Oh, I like that. Oh, yeah. No, they had a real gift for violent poetry. It shows the connection to like Saxon languages too because like you look at almost all the German words. They are that like nipple is breastwort.

Right. You know, what ambulance is cronkenwagon. Sick car, you know, sick wagon, you know, and stuff like that. I'm sorry. I just love the way that would sound. Kronken wagon. Yeah. Oh, okay.

So fun story here. I think I've told this before. Back when I was married, my kids were little. My daughter had we used natural. what's the word like cloth diapers right okay yeah um course she shat herself of course we cleaned her up then we went into the the uh the supermarket so she's got clean drawers and all that but it was hot out so we come back out to the car oh god it's been cooking uh and we get in and my wife at the time she's like oh and i just you know we'd watched a video talking about german words recently and i'm like

Sheisenvagen. And she spits out her drink and I'm like, Spritz and wagen. That's funny. It is. I was, you know, I was quite the catch. But like there's so many German words that are just, you smash them together. So it's called a kenning. Okay.

Yeah. Latin has kenning. The word for to say. sail is the combination of naois, which means boat, and agoagra. We've already talked about this, right? Which is to do. Well, what do you do on a boat? You sail.

So now we go. That's awesome. Yeah. Amazing. Yeah. It's, you know, it's all kinds of fun. Boat stuff. Yeah.

Boat stuff. Yeah. Yeah. But I love that brain locker. That is, that is so good. It's a good one. I really liked, I found the word in your book, guber-tushed.

Yeah, it means like having crooked teeth, like prominent crooked teeth. Yeah. And what I love, your line that you give for it, why it means this is a mystery. Because sometimes that's just how it goes. Yeah,

oh, that's great. Are there any that are holdovers from the last book that would work better here, but you already spent them in the last book. Any words or any concepts? Wait, so like naughty things that would also work well in useless etymology? Yeah, so like things where like the naughty word really showed this concept better than any of the more mundane words did.

I mean, I guess. Oh, damn, I spent it there. I can't remember whether I put this one in both or specifically just in words from hell. So sorry, I got to reread my books. but I think feisty. Feisty is a word. It's from the middle English phrase, feasting cura, meaning farting dog,

like a feisty cur. And feist is a word for a fart related to the word fizzle, which was also a word for a fart. The best explanation we have for this is from Francis Grosz's Dictionary of the Vulgar tongue, which since the 1811 edition, it's heavily editorialized and a bunch of it is just not true. But he gives us our funniest, explanation for it and the the notion is that the the fartiness transferred to feciness as we know it today

because uh ladies would blame their farts on their little lap dogs so i think that fits better with useless etymology really but i think it's all it's inwards from hell yeah love it um i blame the cats a lot of the time ronald why why you're going to do that to it Ronald. That's one of his cat's names. That's the red one, right? I extrapolated. Yeah.

The one that just a moment ago was locked outside, and that's why I had to, you may have seen him in because dummy. But yeah. Are there any words that you feel like in this book, or in the last one, that you gave a good shot to, but they deserve a revisit in another book?

I'd probably add more, you're going to ask me like for examples and I have none but I would probably revisit the antiquated words section and add more and different ones because I think I used some that are a little overplayed so oh okay well you know you can hit people with what they've heard though you know right right yeah but you know guber-tushed I think that one's relatively fresh yeah yeah I am entirely unfamiliar with gubertushed and now anytime I see a kid wearing head gear in my class that's going to pop into my head and I won't be able to get rid of it that's so much fun cool ed do you have any questions i've i've come kind of to the end of my list

actually well um i guess my my only question at this point would be uh of the categories of thing that you've got in in the book which which section was for you the most the most fun to write Like which was there any particular part of it where you were just giggling nonstop while you were while you were doing it. Oh, that's a good question. I would say it's the it's the like odd. It's not even that I was giggling nonstop. It's one of my favorite kinds of videos to make. It's like stuff he didn't notice before.

And I don't I don't think I even included this in the book, but a good example of this and something that I would put in a similar book is there are a lot of like single syllable words in English that are secretly compound words like the word yes is. a compound of the old English word yay and then a and the conjugation of way san which meant to be so yes means so be it and you would use it for like more emphatic yeses than yay because yay was already was already a word for an affirmative and you could also use it to answer negative questions which you can see it being used that way in Shakespeare when someone's like did you not do the thing then you would say yes and instead of yay which you would say it's like did you do the thing. Yay, I did the thing. So that one stuck

around for a while. A couple others, like, Ney is also a compound of two different, even though it's, it pairs well with Yeh, but it's much older in English. It came, it's much newer in English. It came from Old Norse later than Yay, NDS existed.

And then, there are a couple others, Don and Doff are the other ones. Their compounds of do on and do off. which is very fun. Yeah. And like, Doff almost died until Ivanhoe came out because, who is it? Was it Walter Scott?

Yeah, so Walter Scott. Yeah. Okay, there we go. Good. Thank you. But he used Doff pretty frequently because he was writing in the 1800s, but imitating, not the 1800s. When was Walter?

When was Ivanhoe published? I couldn't tell you. I want to say. 1800 is good. I'm not making it up. Yeah. I think, yeah, you're not. You're not wrong.

I think it's, yeah, latter. Oh, no, it's actually like mid-1820. Yeah, okay, there we go. Because his literature and his depiction of the nobility of Middle Ages Europe was a really, really big hit with antebellum planter class, folks. Yes. That's right. And exactly that is why, like, Don and Doff were almost extinct from modern English

until he used them to describe donning armor and Doffing Caval. in Ivanhoe. Oh. It's cool. I want to go back to nay for a second. So because again, Latin nerd, it's so interesting to me that it came to English not by way of the Latin because N.E. is pronounced nay. You add it to the end of the first word or the verb that you're using in that sentence and it turns it into a yes, no question.

Yeah. And they are related. I mean, they're from the same proto-Indo-European root, but English got it from. Old Norse. Right. But also you could use nay. There's certain clauses that get created through that purpose clauses. You could turn it into a negative purpose clause, right?

I did this so that it would not happen. Or you could do it as a result clause. I did this. And it did not happen. You would use nay, which I really love because you can also do a fear clause. And fear clauses invert the nay and the Oot, which Ootney Reader. So that something does not. happen. Right. But if you use nay, you actually hope that something does happen.

Ooh. Well, actually, I'm sorry, you're afraid that something will happen if you use nay. If you use Ute, you're afraid that something won't happen. And it's because our fears and our wishes are just two sides of the same coin. And so it's very interesting just that that that construction exists. But also you could put nay in front of certain words like quidem, nequidem, you know. And so it negates it. negating word. Negate is right there, you know. Right. And so I just love that like English gets to nay as a negating word, but not the way like.

Yeah. So a long time ago, I watched a necropsy of a giraffe, you know, because I'm fun of parties. Yeah. And in that necropsy, they showed this nerve that goes all the way down the giraffe's neck and all the way back up and starts behind the ear. It ends up just behind the jaw, which. Neck-Ropsy. Yeah. It's not to be confused with an autopsy, which is for humans, right?

So necropsy is for animals. But yes, the necropsy for the giraffe was a much longer show. But it's this nerve that goes all the way down the neck and all the way back up. And they show and they're like, look, here's proof that it's not an intelligent design. Because on a fish, it's just straight across. but as this creature has evolved, the nerve didn't just rewire. It kept going and it just grew all the way around.

And there's no reason for it to be there. And so it's going long way around to do the same thing. And it feels like, you know, they're both part of the same PIE. And yet, like, instead of just taking the short hop, it went all the way around, came all the way back up. By the way, it's a fantastic series on the BBC. They did necropsies of all kinds of.

of different animals. It was really cool. My friend Robert Barry, comedian in Sacramento, talked about how they also were going to do a show for baby animals that had died to figure out what happened. And those were going to be called, aw, topcies. But that's Robert Barry's joke, not mine. But, yeah, I love that, nay, did not just hop over like you would expect because, oh,

this just comes from this. And that really tickles at the intuitive aspects of what we were. just talking about with idiomatic phrases of like intuitively this makes so much more sense. Yeah, but it's not true. Yep. Like it comes to us by way of a much dumber root. Yes. Much more Viking fueled route.

Yeah. Well, you know, I don't remember where I first saw it on the internet, but the, the, the, the, the saying was that English is what you get when you teach Vikings Latin in order to have them shout at Germans. That's fun Yeah So Well cool This is Like the last time This has been a real lot of fun

So where can folks find your book Anywhere you buy your books But I particularly recommend bookshop.org Because you can route the purchase Through your local indie bookstore And they get a cut of the deal Nice bookshop. Dot org

I like that All right So Ed What are you going to recommend for people to consume this week? Well, based on our conversation earlier in the, very early in the episode here, I'm going to recommend a collection called the Vintage Mencken, the finest and fiercest essays of the great literary iconoclast. It's a collection of works by H.L. Mencken, who my favorite quote of his is,

and this is I'm paraphrasing because I don't remember the exact wording, but every normal man must from time to time seriously consider spitting on his hands hoisting the black flag and starting to slit throats. Which, you know, based on the state of the world, I totally get right now. So that's my recommendation. How about you?

I'm going to recommend a book called Useless Ety, Offbeat Word Origins for Curious Minds by Jess Zafarist. Because anytime I get a guest, on. I'm going to plug the shit out of their book. Guys, go get that book and it's off of, what did you say is book? Bookshop.org. Yeah, go get that book.

It's, you know, by the time this releases, you probably need to get an I'm sorry gift for missing somebody's Christmas gift. So this is the one. This is definitely the one. It's pretty, too. Like, the cover is really pretty. It is. Okay.

Interestingly, I really like the style of both this one and the previous because they're very complimentary of each other, not just color-wise, but they match in style. The next book will also do that, so I'm very excited about that. Please tell you the next book will be yellow. It's green. It's into the words, so it's green and black. Oh, that makes more sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Green and black's nice. Okay. Yeah. I was just thinking because the first one was maroonish. So I was like, oh, we could go primaries, but that's fine. Jess, what are you going to recommend for people? I am reading a lit RPG book called

dungeon crawler Carl and I highly recommend it. It's very funny and very fun to read. Do you think my kid would like that? Yeah, I do actually. A hundred percent. All right. I'll kick that her way. Cool. Awesome. Let's see. Ed, where can they find us? We can be found on our website at wababwobabwb.gikhistorytime.com. Also on the Apple podcast app, the Amazon podcast app, and on Spotify. And wherever it is that you have found us, please take a minute to subscribe and to give us the five-star review

that you know we deserve, especially that we deserve for getting guests like Jess on here, managing to beg and plead for them. Please, you're too cool for us, we know, but, you know. So, yeah, that's where we can be found. And Mr. Harmony, where can you be found?

Well, let's see. On the first Friday of every month, I'm going to assume that you missed the February 6th show, but March 6th, April 3rd, May 1st. First Friday of every month, you can find me live in Sacramento at 9 p.m. at the Sacramento Comedy Spot. Bring your $15 on down. In fact, better yet, go to saccommodyspot.com and buy your tickets online so you're guaranteed a spot to see us at the spot. And it's the capital punishment. We have been doing this for over 9. years now, come and check out how good we've gotten. We play with all kinds of words. We spin a wheel, people duel. It's all kinds of good fun. So come check out capital punishment at the Sacramento Comedy Spot. If for some reason you're out of town, there is also a streaming option for less money. So go ahead and check it out there. And I know that if you buy the ticket, you can still

watch it later. You don't have to watch it live. So that takes care of my friends in England. And Jess, if you want to be found, where would people want to find you? I recommend my podcast, which is Words Unravelled, on YouTube primarily because we have a fantastic video editor and it's beautifully edited. Though you can listen on any audio platform as well. I also lurk, loiter speak on TikTok. And if you happen to be in Austin next March, I will be speaking at South by Southwest EDU about etymology. That's dope. Cool.

That's really cool. Yeah. Very excited. For a geek history of time, Jess Zafaris, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm Damian Harmony. And I'm Ed Blaylock. And until next time, keep rolling 20s.