Numismatists collect coins. Philatelists collect stamps. I collect words.

Words are sort of like rocks — they come in all shapes, sizes, and colors; some are useful, some not particularly so; the dullest-looking ones can sometimes have the most interesting stories. One of my favorite examples is the word porcelain. Perfectly commonplace word referring to a perfectly mundane household item. And yet, it has a juicy, slightly salacious story. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, porcelain comes (via French) from the Italian word porcellana, meaning cowrie shell.

Nothing too surprising so far. But why the similarity with words related to pigs, like the English word pork — is it just a coincidence? Here’s where it gets good: “[The name porcellana] in Italian is from porcella ‘young sow,’ fem. of Latin porcellus ‘young pig’… According to an old theory, the connection of the shell and the pig is a perceived resemblance of the shell opening to the exposed outer genitalia of [female] pigs.” Ahem. Think about that the next time you get out your fancy dishware.

“Nice” has a surprising history I learned just recently. It has exactly the same origin as the word nescient, meaning ignorant. How did that evolve into a word meaning pleasant or kind, which is sort of the opposite? According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, after entering English in the 13th century with the meaning foolish or timid, it changed to “‘fussy, fastidious’ (late 14c.); to ‘dainty, delicate’ (c. 1400); to ‘precise, careful’ (1500s); to ‘agreeable, delightful’ (1769); to ‘kind, thoughtful’ (1830).” The word nicety, after changing alongside nice, somehow got locked in around 1600, so that it still means fine details, as in “legal niceties.”

A better-known example is that awful and awesome once meant precisely the same thing: so extraordinary as to inspire fearful awe. The words have since then been diluted in different directions, so that nowadays something awful just sucks, and awesome is used interchangeably with nice. The comedian Dylan Moran, in his stand up show What It Is, talks about his struggles to communicate with his children.

Moran: “Here’s some crisps [potato chips], there ‘ya go.”

Children: “Crisps, awesome!”

Moran: “They’re not awesome! They’re crunchy!”

“Artificial” has also changed, having once meant “displaying great artistic skill.” One might have said, in hushed, reverent tones, “The roof of the Sistine Chapel is so artificial, it’s awful.” Villain once meant country bumpkin. Symposium, which nowadays has a distinguished ring, started out meaning drinking party (literally, drinking together). Egregious, which now means flagrantly bad, once meant excellent. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, “Disapproving sense, now predominant, arose late 16c., originally ironic.”

Historical linguistics is more than just fun. As the following fascinating (and hilarious) video shows, it allows you to “raise the dead.”

Here’s a brief run-down of the video. The speaker, Professor Tim Pulju (who taught my Linguistics 1 class many years ago), is an expert in Proto-Indo-European. PIE (which is spelled out, not pronounced like the baked good) is almost sure to have existed; even though it was never written down, the similarities between known languages like Latin, Greek, Russian, and Sanskrit allow us to conclude that they are descended from a common ancestor. Today the daughter languages of PIE have about 3 billion native speakers, and include most of the languages spoken in Europe, as well as a swath of languages from Iran to (all but the southern tip of) India.

When, where, and by whom was PIE spoken? What did they care about? What technology did they have? How did their migrations lead to the distribution of peoples and languages we see today? According to Professor Pulju, “You can put on a pith helmet and get a shovel and go and dig up their graves and their pots and so on. That takes a lot of work, and you’ll get hot. Instead, what you can do is you can go over to the library and look at languages and it’s air conditioned in the summer…”

And what can linguistic analysis tell us? For instance, the Proto-Indo-European people had copper. They did not have iron. (Because they had a word for copper, and none for iron.) They had horses and wheels, but not chickens. Facts like these allow scholars to place them in time and space. It’s also possible to learn about their beliefs, their social structure, and so on…

How wonderful that the words we use every day contain the fossilized remains of ancient cultures! In fact, there are so-called fossil words that have no independent meaning today, but survive in idioms, such as kith and kin or hoist with one’s own petard.

Perhaps the better analogy is that language evolves, like life evolves. (In this analogy, words like kith and petard might correspond to vestigial organs.) In fact, there’s a long history of linguists influencing biologists, and vice versa, along these lines. For instance, the idea of parent and daughter languages was popularized by the 18th century British philologist Sir William Jones, who travelled to India and was struck by the similarities of Sanskrit to Latin and Greek. These ideas influenced the later work of Charles Darwin on biological evolution (Sverker Johansson, Origins of Language: Constraints on hypotheses, p. 32; see also On the Origin of Species, 1st ed., Chapter XIII, pp. 422-423).

Of course, we ought to be careful — analogies can be a powerful tool to enlighten, or to mislead. Are languages really like species, or is the resemblance superficial? The following fascinating paper explores four analogies between language and biology, “languages are like species” being one of them. The paper explains that there really are some deep connections between the two. Linguistic change, like biological change, is based on very small, random variations that accumulate over time. When human populations are prevented from communicating, by geography or other barriers, their languages tend to diverge; when populations of a given animal species are prevented from having sex, they tend to diverge into separate species. The methods for constructing linguistic and biological family trees are basically the same.

There are also serious differences. For one thing, in biological evolution it’s very clear what does the evolving: DNA. In linguistic evolution it’s much less clear. Language is a complex, multi-layered thing, involving among other things sounds, meanings, and the connection between the two. Linguistic sounds, though not as simple as the four DNA bases, can still be more or less enumerated, and I can sort of believe that they evolve in a similar way. But meanings seem much more complex, connected as they are with technology, culture, psychology, society.

Relatedly, it’s to be expected that life would be in some ways much more diverse than language. Language is a very high-level phenomenon that’s built on the brains of human beings, and human beings are all basically the same. Certain aspects of human language are universal, and many scholars, including Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker, believe this has much to tell us about our innate nature. In any case, life is a lower-level phenomenon. In terms of programming, language might be C++; life might be assembly.

Third, borrowing is very common in languages, and not as common across different species (though it is important in the world of bacteria via conjugation, transformation, and transduction). English is regarded as a Germanic language, because both English and German can be traced continuously back to the same ancestor. But the English of today is the result of massive amounts of borrowing, most notably from French (because of the Norman Conquest) and directly from Latin. My high school Spanish teacher once told me that the words that sound highbrow in English are often cognate to words every Spanish-speaking child knows. These words were always used in Spanish, by plebian and patrician alike. But after the Norman Conquest it was the aristocracy that used the new French vocabulary; in the Renaissance it was wealthy merchants and scholars who were familiar with Latin; so in English these words took on an air of sophistication. Here is Poul Anderson’s really cool take on what atomic theory might sound like if these borrowings had never happened (and Douglas Hofstadter’s analysis of Anderson’s essay).

Mostly we’ve been talking about common words. They are nothing to sneeze at; not only are they the bread and butter of everyday speech, but learning their stories provides hours of entertainment (if you’re like me). But some words are rare gems. We may love them for their meaning, their sound, or their sheer whimsy. Here are a few of my favorites — what are yours?

Sesquipedalian This word describes itself: a sesquipedalian word is long (literally having “one and a half feet”).

Lilliputian and its lesser seen opposite, Brobdingnagian, words from Gulliver’s Travels (Brobdingnagian, after the giants of Brobdingnag, also describes itself).

Lilliput (http://4umi.com/image/book/swift/gulliver-pindar-lilliput-troops.jpg)

Brobdingnag (http://4umi.com/image/book/swift/gulliver-jackson-brobdingnag-fopperies.jpg)

Serendipity, fortunate happenstance, as in these scientific discoveries. Serendipity was coined by Horace Walpole in 1754, who based it on the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip, the latter being an old word for Sri Lanka. Serendip derives ultimately from Sanskrit.

Juggernaut, another word from Sanskrit, meaning an overwhelming destructive object or force. Ultimately a title of Krishna, juggernaut in this sense is based on an annual Krishna festival in India, involving a large chariot bearing Krishna’s statue. According to (probably false) European legend, devotees would hurl themselves under the chariot’s wheels in sacrifice. A similarly colorful word is behemoth, meaning a huge, possibly monstrous thing, named after a Biblical beast. As in, behemoths like Google and Amazon are becoming too powerful.



Filibuster, snollygoster, and gerrymander, spirited Americanisms involved in politics. Filibuster, which today means to steal the limelight by talking continuously, has a history quite as juicy as the word itself. Filibuster originally referred to pirates, who stole much more than just limelight! It comes from the Dutch vrijbuiter; literally, “free booty.”

Discombobulated, another Americanism; a really fun word for an un-fun condition: being confused, upset, rattled.

Hornswoggle, from American slang, and bamboozle, from British slang, both of which mean to cheat by deception.

Vagabond, a wanderer. Vagabonds are peripatetic, which is also kind of a fun word.

Defenestration, an erudite way to say “the act of throwing [someone or something] out a window.” As in, I demand the defenestration of Donald Trump.

Callipygian, another SAT word with a less-than-dignified meaning: having beautifully proportioned buttocks. Isn’t it great that there’s a respectable word for this?

Mellifluous, literally, flowing with honey (as in a mellifluous voice).

Syzygy When I was a kid, I was delighted that this is even a word. Means the alignment of three astronomical bodies. For example, during a solar eclipse, the Moon comes between the Sun and the Earth, forming a syzygy.

Zeitgeist, the “spirit of the times.” Geist, of course, is the German word for spirit, ghost (hence, poltergeist, which means “noisy ghost”).

Nabob, an important or rich person, from Arabic by way of Hindi. As in nattering nabobs of negativism.

Onomatopoeia, a great word word, meaning “imitative of a sound.” Examples include buzz, vroom, bow-wow, etc. I assume all languages have onomatopoetic words. One of the very few Hebrew words I know is the word for bottle (as in, water bottle): bakbuk (בקבוק), the sound it makes when you pour. Usually the assignment of sounds to meanings, in the form of words, is sort of arbitrary. (Though not completely! See Invented Worlds: The Psychology of the Arts, pp. 249-252.) The exception is onomatopoetic words, which refer to sounds that sound like the word. Kids freely engage in onomatopoeia, and it’s interesting to speculate that onomatopoeia played a significant role in the early development of human language.

A friend of mine once said that “there are too many words.” I see what he meant. It’s true that, up to a point, more words amplify the power of language by allowing us to express original thoughts in original ways (this power is chillingly taken away in George Orwell’s Newspeak). But surely, at some point there are diminishing returns. Most people don’t know the word callipygian, and get along pretty well without it.

But, as you could probably tell, I don’t think about language in purely utilitarian terms. Language can also be a window into human culture and history. A person who knows what “callipygian” means might know that it comes from a Greek root meaning “beauty,” the same root that gives us Calliope (a Greek muse, who was the namesake of a musical instrument) and Callisto (a nymph, in Greek mythology, and the fourth moon of Jupiter). Language is even a window into human thought.

Which Callisto is

more callipygian?

And, of course, language can be an art form, something to be savored in its own right. Is this irrational, this sentimental attachment to a communication tool? Maybe. But why collect coins or stamps, which are also meant to be simple practical things? It’s an interesting feature of human nature that given enough time, we grow attached to our tools. Math was once just a tool. Science too — before the Greeks, it was there only to help engineers and priests. The same might even be true of music. One could imagine that music began with tribal chants, which might have served to preserve the tribe’s stories, revere the gods, build unity, and instill courage before a hunt. Such people might have looked quite strangely at the music of Beethoven or the Beatles, which exists just because (or does music today do similar things, just a little less obviously?). So why do we do this? Assuming I figure it out, that will be the subject of another post!