upworthy

etymology

@humanteneleven/Instagram

Why do so many negative words begin with the letter "n"?

Learning about language—whether diving into newfangled phrases taking over the current zeitgeist, or examining the unexpected threads that tie seemingly unrelated languages together throughout history—is endlessly fascinating. All at once, clues about humanity’s past, present, and future are revealed.

For instance, why do so many words with a negative connotation begin with the letter “n”? Sure, there are obvious exceptions, like nice, nifty, neat, etc., but when you think about not, never, nothing, nihilistic, nought, and yes, even the word negative itself…seems like a lot. Is this just an English language thing? Does the letter “n” have an inherently negative quality in our collective psyche? If so…why?

This was a topic recently tackled by etymology enthusiast @humanteneleven. In a short-and-sweet video, he explains that in the days of Old English, the word “ne,” meaning “not,” was used to negate, or give the opposite meaning, of virtually anything. N + one + “none,” n + either + "neither," and so on.

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Even with English words that were borrowed from Latin, as well as other non-English languages like French, German, Russian, and Sanskrit, we see this pattern. That’s because the Proto-Indo-European language, the mother of all these languages, also used the word “ne” to negate meaning.

However, just to complicate things a bit, we also see this in languages that did not originate from Proto-Indo-European, like Japanese and Vietnamese. This prompted a linguist by the name of Otto Jespersen in the late 1880s to theorize that there must be some primal association of negative feelings with the “n” sound. According to him, it was carried over from when ancient humans scrunch up their nose in contempt, and the sound would follow. “The biological reaction of disgust is inherently nasal,” explained @humanteneleven.

Over a hundred years later, researchers tested the theory, and found that this correlation was more of a coincidence. Except in the case of Indo-European languages, who share that common linguistic ancestor.

Obviously, the biggest takeaway from all this is a new level of appreciation for the Knights that say Ni!

By the way, if you’re curious as to what Proto-Indo-European might have sounded like, this video aims to scratch that itch.

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And if you’re interested in even more language deep dives, @humanteneleven has all kinds of gems like these.

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Be sure to give @humanteneleven a follow for even more etymology fun.

Joy

People share how badly named things should be renamed and it's an absolute riot

Contractions = "birthquakes" and jet skis = "boatercycles."

Dentures really should be called substitooths.


Language is a fascinating thing to explore. Where words come from, how things are named, the way sayings and slang are constantly being invented—it's all great fun to plunge into.

But sometimes a deep dive into words and language reveals missed opportunities as we contemplate what a thing should be called instead of what it is.

Reddit user johnnylgarfield asked, "What is badly named, and what is a better name for it?" and hoo boy did the wordsmiths deliver.


Anything that could have "Otto" in it should

"Otto Preminger wrote his own biography and failed to title it Otto-Biography.

Once in a lifetime pun, and he just threw it away." – hippo717

"I saw an automatic car wash with the name "Otto's automatic carwash"

The fact it wasn't called an ottomatic carwash still hurts me." – ShadowVader

man riding on a jet ski

Man taking a "boatercycle" out for a spin.

Photo by Yuriy Bogdanov on Unsplash

Alternate names for everyday things that we should seriously consider

"I keep seeing people say that contractions should be birthquakes." – ssssobtaostobs

"Dentures. Should be Substitooths" – donkeyknuckles

"Any bacon alternative that is not named Fācon is an abomination." – RitaPoonismysister

"Jet ski. Dumb name. Obviously it is a Boatercycle." – KYbywayofNY

"Hemorrhoids should be asteroids obv." – UncleDuude

"Olives should be Greece’s Pieces." – rmg18555

Words that just shouldn't be the way they are, on principle

"Abbreviation should be a much shorter word. Dyslexia should also be easier to spell."– Masked_Daisy

"Lisp" shouldn't make me lisp." – rhaegar89

"And why isn't palindrome a palindrome?" – slimfastdieyoung

"Why is a fear of palindromes aibohphobia?!?" – 1nonspecificgirl

"The same reason the fear of big words is hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia." – redwolf1219

"The word for your condition is also your exposure therapy!" – quaffee

butterfly on a flower

A beautiful flutterby.

Photo by Calvin Mano on Unsplash

How about two things that should simply be swapped?

"I'm not the first to say it, but 'pick-up artists' and 'garbage men' should swap titles." – GGAllinPartridge

"A driveway should be a parkway and a parkway should be a driveway." – scottcmu

"And cookies and bacon should switch since you bake cookies but cook bacon." – cwx149

"Butterflies should be Flutterbys." – genderlawyer

A whole thread just for the weather folks

"Weather forecast is boring. Weather prophecy is awesome." – dire18

"Atmospheric foretelling." – uneducated_sock

"Precipitation Prognostication" – VonBrewskie

"As the atmospheric oracles have foretold, 'tis raining." – Shi-Rokku

"Meteoracles*" – HauntedHippie

"You mean the skyentists?" – illfygli

a group of crows on a stone wall

"Murder of crows" can stay.

Photo by Qurratul Ayin Sadia on Unsplash

And everyone's favorite, the naming of animal groups

"Why is a group of squid called a shoal when it should be called a squad?" – xdark_realityx

"A squid squad? Nice.

A crow crew

A whale wall

A swan swarm

A bat batch

A lobster cluster

and of course

A group of groupers" – loopywolf

"Cloister of oysters" – itsmarvin

"A Murder of Crows. It should be a CawCawphony." – EscapedCapybara

"A murder of crows goes so unfathomably hard tho, it can stay." – mrspuffispeng

"The committee on groups of bird names are the best in the business. They put everyone else to shame. Murder, curiosity, charm, kettle, mural, cast, parliament. Why even compete?" – remeard


Pop Culture

These fun facts about how 5 well-known things got their names are blowing people's minds

Did you know that the name "Idaho" was made up by a con artist who tried to pass it off as a Native American word?

From how Idaho got its name to why we capitalize "B" in "dB," here are some fascinating factoids.

The "I was today years old when I learned" meme might be a bit overdone at this point, but thanks to the random factoids people share on the internet, it's a near-daily reality. Rarely do we go an entire day without seeing some surprising, delightful or head-scratching piece of info cross our feeds.

Let's take the etymology of words, for example. Did you know that the word "jumbo" originated from an exceptionally large elephant named "Jumbo," and not the other way around? Or that the word "muscle" comes from the Latin musculus, meaning "little mouse," because the Romans thought that muscles moving looked like mice running under the skin?

It's fun to see where things come from, but sometimes we can be surprised by an origin that we thought for sure couldn't be right, but actually is. For instance:


Michelin star ratings for fancy restaurants come from the Michelin tire company.

Yes, really. The assumption many of us have been operating under is that Michelin the restaurant review guide must have been founded by some hoity toity French restaurant critic and not the tire company with the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man mascot. Yet here we are, being all wrong.

They don't even try to hide it, so it's surprising that many of us don't know this. The logo and the Michelin man are right there at the top of the Michelin guide website, and the story of how the guide came about is shared on the About Us page:

"It all started in Clermont-Ferrand in central France in 1889, when brothers Andre and Edouard Michelin founded their eponymous tire company, fuelled by a grand vision for the French automobile industry at a time when there were fewer than 3,000 cars in the country. In order to help motorists develop their trips - thereby boosting car sales and in turn, tyre purchases - the Michelin brothers produced a small guide filled with handy information for travellers, such as maps, information on how to change a tyre, where to fill up on petrol, and wonderfully - for the traveller in search of respite from the adventures of the day - a listing of places to eat or take shelter for the night."

The Michelins gave away the guide for free until one of them saw a tire shop using them to prop up a workbench. They decided to demonstrate the value of the guide by charging money for it. They also started sending mystery diners to review restaurants anonymously, and over the next hundred years they'd hone the star rating system that restaurants now aspire to impress with.

The "Guinness" of The Guinness Book of World Records is actually the same Guinness as the beer company.

Similar story here—who knew this was the same Guinness? Only this time, the offshoot was founded not by Guinness himself but by British engineer and industrialist Sir Hugh Beaver, the managing director of the Guinness Brewery. He conceived of the idea in the early 1950s to satisfy bar patrons who asked trivia questions.

The impetus was Beaver himself getting into an argument over what was the fastest game bird in Europe during a shooting match. But he couldn't find the answer in any reference books. So he decided to create a book with the help of a couple of sports journalists, and the Guinness Book of World Records was born.

The first book was 190 pages and had 4,000 entries. As of 2022, more than 60,000 Guinness world records had been catalogued in the world records database.

The reason the "B" in dB, the abbreviation for "decibel," is capitalized is because it's named after Alexander Graham Bell.

This is one that came out of left field for a lot of folks. How many years did we spend in school without learning this simple fact?


Remember Hansen's Natural soda? It morphed into Monster.

If you were a child of the 80s or 90s, and especially if you had parents who were anti-Big Soda or anti-high fructose corn syrup, you probably drank your fair share of Hansen's Natural soda.

If you weren't paying close attention, you may not know that in 2012, Hansen's Natural Corporation officially changed its name…to Monster Beverage Corporation. That's right, as in Monster energy drinks. Apparently, they found that energy drinks had become their bread and butter, so they leaned into it full force.

Talk about a wild pendulum swing of a rebrand.

"Idaho" was made up by as sketchy congressional delegate who tried to pass it off as a Native American word

There are some unclear spots in the story, but the gist is that back in 1860, the Western territory of that would become Colorado was soon to become a state and needed a name. Congress wanted the state to have a Native American name and someone suggested Idaho, a name allegedly coined by congressional delegate George M. Willing, who claimed it was a Native American word from the Shoshone that meant "Gem of the Mountains." It wasn't and it didn't. He totally made it up.

Congress approved "Idaho" as the name for Colorado at first, but then took it back after they found out it wasn't actually a Native American name. (Did they then choose a Native American name? No, they went with the Spanish name of Colorado.)

In the meantime, someone had named a steamboat in the Pacific Northwest "Idaho," and then some mines got named after the steamboat, and after a few years and several "named after" iterations, people forgot that Idaho was a fake, made-up word, and Congress gave the state its name.

And now, Idaho is not only a state but the last name of a fan-favorite character in one of the best loved sci-fi stories of all time that takes place 10,000 years into the future. A conman's word forever immortalized. God bless America.

Photo by Lisa Therese on Unsplash

The word "jumbo" literally comes from an elephant.

The evolution of language is fascinating, and the etymology of specific words can be a fun little trip through human history as well as human creativity.

Many English words are derived from Greek and Latin, but other European languages make up a good chunk of our language as well. The roots of some words can surprise us, and so can the way certain words came to be. And in some cases, what we don't know can be just as surprising as what we do.

Enjoy diving into the history of 15 words we use every day.

1. Dog

Dog is often one of the first words babies learn to say, and it's one of the first kids learn to spell. But don't let its simplicity fool you. This word is truly a mystery.

The word "dog" comes from dogca, a very rarely used Old English word, but how we started using it as our everyday name for canines, no one knows. "Its origin remains one of the great mysteries of English etymology," according to the Online Etymology Dictionary.

Even more interestingly, no one knows the origins of the Spanish word for "dog" ("perro"), nor do they know the origins of the Polish ("pies") or Serbo-Croatian ("pas") words for our canine friends, either. Who knew dogs were so enigmatic?

2. Nightmare

It's obvious where "night" comes from in "nightmare," but what about "mare"? Surely, were not referring to a female horse here.

Horse, no. But female, yes. Female goblin, to be precise. In Old English, mare means "incubus, nightmare, monster; witch, sorcerer." And "nightmare" started being used around 1300 to refer to "an evil female spirit afflicting men (or horses) in their sleep with a feeling of suffocation." Yikes. Thankfully, now it's just any old bad dream.

3. Jumbo

We've all seen animals named for words with certain meanings, but here we have the opposite. The word "jumbo" came from a large elephant who lived at the London Zoo. Zookeeper Anoshan Anathjeysari named him "Jumbe," the Swahili word for "chief." But his status as one of the largest African bush elephants in Europe in the 19th century caused his nickname, Jumbo, to become synonymous with enormousness.

muscular man exercising

Run, little mouse, run.

Photo by Anastase Maragos on Unsplash

4. Muscle

The Latin word musculus means "little mouse." As hilarious as it sounds, they thought the movement of muscles looked like little mice scurrying under the skin, hence the origin. Kinda ick to think about, but also logical, so here we are.

5. Quarantine

Ah, a word with which we are all familiar, thanks to COVID-19. But do we know what it really means?

If you understand roots, you may guess that "quar" might have something to do with the number four, and you'd be right. In Latin, quadraginta means a period of 40 days. Our usage of "quarantine" to mean isolation from others comes from the Venetian policy of ships coming into port from plague-stricken countries in the late 1300s to remain in port for 40 days before letting people off. The usage to mean any period of time in isolation began being used in the 1600s.

6. Mortgage

Most of us grow up not really understanding what a mortgage is until we buy our first house, but even then, most of us don't know what the word literally means. It comes from Old French, mort gaige, literally meaning "death pledge."

HAHAHAHAHA. Death pledge. Mortgage. That's funny.

However, it doesn't mean you're tied to the debt til you die, even if it feels like it. The death part means the deal dies either when you pay it off or when you become unable to pay. Doesn't really change the fact that it feels a bit like you're signing your life away when you buy a house, though.

ball of yarn

What does a ball of yarn have to do with "clue"?

Photo by Philip Estrada on Unsplash

7. Clue

Oddly enough, "clue" comes from a misspelling (or alternate spelling from before standardized spelling was a thing) of the word "clew," meaning a ball of yarn.

The word itself comes from German, but its usage points to the Greek myth in which Ariadne gives Theseus a ball (or clew) of yarn to help him escape the labyrinth. Now we use it to refer to anything that helps us solve a mystery.

8. Nice

The word "nice" is nice and simple, right? It's the most basic word we use for "pleasant," a definitively positive word. But this seemingly simple word has been through quite the trek in its etymology.

From the Latin nescius, meaning "ignorant, unaware," it was used to mean "timid" or"faint-hearted" before the year 1300. A couple hundred years later, it had morphed to "fussy, fastidious" or "dainty, delicate." In another 100 years, it changed to "precise, careful." Tack on another few hundred years and we're at "agreeable, delightful," and from there it was only short jaunt to "kind, thoughtful."

What a nice journey from insult to compliment.

9. Shampoo

I would have bet money that the word "shampoo" was French in origin, but nope. It's Hindi, coming from the term champo, and the original meaning was "to massage, rub and percuss the surface of (the body) to restore tone and vigor." It's only been used to refer specifically to lathering and washing out strands of hair or carpet since the mid 1800s.

10. Torpedo

Literally Latin for a stingray. As in the marine animal. That comes from the root word torpere, which means "be numb," since a ray's sting can numb you. It doesn't become the word for a propelled underwater explosive until the last couple hundred years.

11. Ambidextrous

We know that left-handedness was seen negatively throughout much of human history, but even the word that means "able to use both hands equally" has a right-handed bias baked into it. The medieval Latin ambidexter literally meansliterally means "right-handed on both sides."

Isn't English fun?