From Ampersands to Astronauts: Fun Facts for Word Nerds
(7-minute read)
You know the drill: language is fun, I find its quirks and share them with you. So, let’s just ‘Skip to Recipe’, shall we?
Ha ha ha
Your first fun fact is a short and sweet one from the Land of Smiles. The Thai word for five is ห้า (pronounced hâa). That’s why, to convey laughing over text, many Thai speakers simply write '555'.
2. And…
An ampersand is the weird eight-ish symbol we use to write the word and when we’re short on time: &. The Romans created this symbol from the word et some time before Vesuvius buried Pompeii. In Latin, et means and; this is where the French et, the Italian e, and the Spanish y come from. Look at the picture below and you’ll see how these letters also gave us the ampersand.
But how did this symbol get its English name?
In English, we used to differentiate single letters from single-letter words (e.g., the letter a from the word a) by supporting the former with the Latin per se, which means by itself. By saying, "A per se, a", we’d be clarifying that the character a by itself is the word a.
In the 1800s, the ampersand was often recognised as a quasi-letter and included at the end of the alphabet (designers and typesetters might note that it often still is in contemporary typography), so when school children recited the alphabet, they’d conclude, “X, Y, Z, and per se &”. Over time, their words slurred together to become ampersand.
Accidental creations of new words from the mispronunciation of old ones like this are called mondegreens. I love them. I’m still waiting for elemeno to become a word in its own right, though…
3. Turn that frown upside-down
This one blew my tiny mind: the word frown has a different definition depending on where it’s being used.
Most English speakers in North America would define a frown as a down-turned mouth, whilst English speakers in Britain would usually associate frowning with the brows.
I’ve asked a few Aussie pals which part of the face they associate frowning with, and the answers have been a mixed bag.
I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that a whole continent frowns primarily with their mouth!
I’d love to create a map of the world with each area colour-coded according to whether the people there are mouth-frowners or brow-frowners linguistically.
For the record, I’m #teambrow all the way.
4. So nice they say it twice
I’m sure you’re aware of much of the redundancy present in Modern English. It’s a language hodge-podged together by other languages, so there’s bound to be some overlap. But some of the redundant words we use are so doubly-triply pointless, they become rather comical.
Such redundancies are often food related, especially where the food has travelled; we see this in chai tea, salsa sauce, and naan bread (which literally mean tea tea, sauce sauce, and bread bread). We’re not the only language that does this, of course. The same kind of doubling up is what gives Nepal their own bread bread: pau roti.
We find similar redundancies, unsurprisingly, in many place names. In Arabic, sahara means desert, as does gobi in Mongolian. English took these and doubled them, giving us the Sahara Desert and the Gobi Desert. Similarly, when we took the Algonquin word mississippi and smushed it next to the English word river, we unwittingly named the second-longest river in North America the Big River River. Likewise, the La Brea Tar Pits are literally The Tar Tar Pits; Mount Kilimanjaro is Mount White Mountain; East Timor is East East; and the list goes on.
But my favourite examples of this redundancy are found in the British countryside. While Torpenhow Hill (Hillhillhill Hill) appears to be a ghost word, there are many examples in this country of triple hills: Pendle Hill, Bredon Hill, and Kendal Hill can all be translated to Hillhill Hill.
5. Thank your lucky stars
We can expect certain words to have fallen from the skies – the word astronaut, for example, can be broken down into the Ancient Greek ástron (star) and naútēs (sailor). But there are many words we use each day without realising their celestial beginnings. Disaster, for example, comes from the Italian dis (bad) and astro (star), the idea being that the bad fate was written in the stars. Asterisk is derived from the Greek asteriskos (little star). And we find lunar etymological roots in Monday, month, and menstruation throughout Europe.
6. AWESOME
For our last fact: did you know that typesetters used to literally set the type by placing individual pieces of metal type ready for print? Smaller letters were used more often than bigger letters, so they were kept closer to hand in a lower case than the bigger letters. This standard storage of letters by typesetters is what gives us the terms uppercase and lowercase!
Got any more fun facts for me? Head to my contact page and pop me a message, I’d love to hear them!