Author: Arika

Most titles we use in front of people’s names in English are abbreviations of longer words. Dr. stands for doctor, Mr. for mister, and Mrs. for mistress (though we stopped pronouncing it that way). What does Ms. stand for?

Nothing but itself. The title Ms. was made up, not as a shortening of another word, but as a way to avoid commenting on the marital status of a woman. Traditionally, Miss was the proper term for an unmarried woman, and Mrs. was for a married woman. Ms. did not become generally accepted as a title until well into the 1980s, after years of lobbying for its use by feminist activists.

The origin of the title, however, can be traced all the way back to 1901, when it was proposed in the Springfield Sunday Republican as a way to avoid an embarrassing faux pas when speaking about a woman whose “domestic situation” was unknown. It was noted that the pronunciation mizz, a sort of slurring indeterminacy between miss and missus, was already a common way to avoid making such a social blunder. Ms. put a formal label on what people were already doing, though its acceptance in formal circles took nearly a century.

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Deaf kids who visit the Regency Mall in Racine, Wisconsin, this year will have a chance to tell Santa what they want directly. In an interview with local news station WQAD 8, Santa explained, “the children appreciate the idea that they can come and talk to me, talk to Santa without having to go through their parents or their siblings to interpret for them.”

The idea that Santa should be able to communicate with children who have different language needs is becoming more popular. Last year, a video of Santa signing with a little girl at a shopping center in Middlesbrough, England, went viral. That shopping center will once again feature “the world famous Signing Santa” this year.

Signing Santa doesn’t just benefit kids who sign; he can help bring sign language to everyone. Tomorrow in Toronto, a Christmas market will be hosting not only a signing Santa, but a whole program of events related to sign language in cooperation with the Deaf Culture Center there. The program is open to all, and perfect for the spirit of the season.

What is the trendiest baby name in American history? Jayden? Madison? Khaleesi?

The answer might not sound so trendy to you: Linda.

Quantifying trendiness is tricky, since there’s no universally accepted way to calculate how much of a fad a name was. But according to researcher David Taylor, Linda may very well be the trendiest name ever. Taylor devised a metric for trendiness that takes into account overall popularity as well as steepness of a name’s rise and fall. So while Mary was very, very popular, it was popular over a long time period, and therefore not trendy. And while Deneen had a huge quick spike in popularity over a few years in the 1960s, it never accounted for a very high percentage of names even at its peak.

In 2015, just .022 percent of all female births in the U.S. were Lindas. But in 1947, it had the largest yearly rise ever, accounting for 5.48 percent of all baby girls’ names. This sudden meteoric rise was due to the wild success of one hit single: a 1946 Jack Lawrence song named, appropriately, “Linda.”

“Linda” was written in 1942, but only released in 1946, later nearing the top of the Billboard Juke Box Record Plays charts in 1947. The song was written about then-1-year-old Linda Louise Eastman, later known as Linda McCartney.

Linda peaked in popularity as a baby name a year later in 1948, and it would remain in the top 5 names for girls through 1963. However, by 1954, Linda had already declined to be around half as popular as it was at its peak, having been overtaken at number 1 by Mary, the name it had replaced at the top.

For the historically curious, it can be a fun exercise to go through baby name fads to try and discover what led to a name’s rise in popularity. Another high profile example from pop culture is the name Shirley, spurred on by the child actress Shirley Temple. Shirley peaked as a baby name in 1935. Like Linda, it didn’t take long for it to decline in popularity.

Going by Taylor’s metric, all but one of the top 10 trendiest names of all time were girl’s names. The only top 10 name from male births is Dewey, with peak years at the end of the 19th century. By whatever measure, it does seem to be the case that popular names given to female babies tend to be more ephemeral. A recent compilation of 30 baby name fads by MooseRoots was also mainly names given to girls.

According to a 2009 PNAS study by marketing professor Jonah Berger, this rise-and-fall behavior may actually be the norm and not the exception: “Most names show a period of almost consistent increase in popularity, followed by a decline that leads to abandonment.” Berger’s analysis found that what made names differ is “how quickly their popularity rises and declines.” Berger examined rates of rise and decline, and found that names which became popular faster tended to be abandoned faster as well. Berger also surveyed expectant parents on their attitudes about baby names. Names that gained quick popularity tended to give parents pause. They were “seen as more likely to be short-lived fads,” thereby making parents less likely to adopt them.

Will there be another name like Linda? No and yes. The days when any one name could achieve 5 percent popularity for baby girls seem to be long gone. Top names for girls now hover at around 1 percent, indicative of a much greater overall diversity—and a hesitation to get on a really popular naming bandwagon.

But will parents seek out new names en masse only for those to fall out of favor shortly thereafter? Absolutely. Just as Britney and Miley have declined in recent years, so now Arya and Aria are seeing a bit of Game of Thrones-fueled growth (helped along by the show Pretty Little Liars). What new name will emerge from 2016? Don’t be surprised if a good amount of parents watching Stranger Things this year decide to name their baby girls Eleven.

If the name Jack London rings any bells at all, it likely brings to mind vague images of huskies and sleighs. The author’s most enduring novel, 1903’s The Call of the Wild, remains a staple for grade school reading across the U.S. But because his legacy has been so closely bound up with childhood reading, London’s adventurous and sometimes sordid life is much less familiar. When he died on November 22, 1916, at only 40 years old, he had lived more than most.

The Call of the Wild indeed captivated the country with its fascinating portrayal of the perilous Klondike gold rush. The story propelled London to celebrity status as a pioneer of American magazine fiction. Telling the tale of a heroic dog named Buck, the novel is a landmark in America’s long love affair with nature writing. By writing the experience of man’s best friend, the author managed to include many of the complex moral and social questions he grappled with. “The proper function of man,” he said, “is to live, not to exist.” A fascination with surviving and thriving runs through The Call of the Wild and the bulk of all London’s writing. So who was the literary genius behind this enduring classic, and what kind of life bred such nuanced ideas about human nature?

Born in San Francisco in 1876, London described his early years in terms of struggle, the theme that dominates his fiction and colored his strong convictions. In a body of work spanning adventure, memoir, and science fiction, he returned again and again to situations which tried the human (as well as canine) spirit.

London’s own life was a yarn for the ages as well. Revisiting a bit of the author’s wild ride can help us appreciate his uncanny insight into the world, and humanity’s never-ending search for a place in it.

1. BEFORE BECOMING A SUCCESSFUL WRITER, HIS OCCUPATIONS INCLUDED BOTH OYSTER PIRATE AND DRIFTER.

Jack London’s life was anything but conventional. Never a stranger to hard work, he started earning wages for his family at a very young age. As a teenager, resenting a soul-crushing job on a cannery assembly line, London turned to sketchier means of making a living. Borrowing $300 from his boyhood nurse, he purchased a small boat to poach oysters in the privately controlled beds of San Francisco Bay.

A few years later, once more dodging the grueling manual labor of the unregulated industrial revolution, London took to the train tracks with a group of so called “road-kids.” “I am a fluid sort of an organism,” he wrote, “with sufficient kinship with life to fit myself in ’most anywhere.” His drifting took him across the country and even landed him in a brief stint in prison. At 19, London wised up and went to high school.

2. THOUGH HE FAILED AS A GOLD PROSPECTOR, THE KLONDIKE GAVE HIM MATERIAL FOR HIS BEST WORK.

The discovery of gold in the Yukon lured London with the promise of quick riches. Outfitted by his brother-in-law, he joined the rush in 1897 but proved an unlucky prospector. “I brought nothing back from the Klondike but my scurvy,” the writer later declared after wringing just a few dollars’ worth of gold dust from gold fields. However, he did manage to extract something precious from his experience: larger than life characters and a fascination with survival in nature’s extremes. These are the hallmarks of his writing which fueled his rise to fame.

3. MUCH OF HIS WORK SHOWS THE INFLUENCE OF DARWIN’S “SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST.”‘

When London tells of “an old song, old as the breed itself” that stirred his hero Buck, London conjures the idea of a collective unconscious that “harked back through the ages of fire and roof to the raw beginnings of life in the howling ages.”

When London sailed for Alaska en route to the Yukon, he brought with him books by Charles Darwin. The ruthless nature implied by Darwin’s theory of natural selection—survival of the fittest—abounds in London’s work. The Klondike of The Call of the Wild is quite literally a dog-eat-dog world, in which London lauds resourcefulness and strength of will above all else.

4. HIS RICH BUT PLAIN DESCRIPTIONS OF NATURE FORESHADOWED THE SUCCESS OF MODERNISTS LIKE HEMINGWAY.

Much of London’s success was garnered through magazine publishing; he gained celebrity and fortune from his writing alone as mass-scale printing became cheaper and more people became literate. It’s just one parallel to Ernest Hemingway, who followed in London’s footsteps. The two also share stylistic preferences for plain-spoken portrayals of nature and an economy of words—traits Hemingway is often given credit for popularizing despite coming after London. Indeed, certain passages of London’s finest prose, like his short story “To Build a Fire,” could easily be mistaken for Hemingway’s.

5. HE WAS AN OUTSPOKEN SOCIALIST WHO ADVOCATED FOR THE RIGHTS OF THE DISADVANTAGED.

The writer’s unconventional formative years left a lasting impression on his worldview. Upon his return from the Klondike, London became involved in San Francisco’s burgeoning socialist political scene. He was apparently so fervent in his political beliefs, when London met and courted Russian-born socialist student Anna Strunsky in 1899, she likened meeting him to meeting a young Karl Marx.

Perhaps in spite of his sober realism towards the tough nature of life, or perhaps because of it, he wrote extensively on the need to protect the dignity of workers and the disadvantaged. It’s just part of the legacy left by one of America’s masters of popular fiction—an American pioneer in more senses than one.

Spoiler Warning: If you haven’t seen Arrival and plan to soon, you might want to save this article for after.

The most exciting thing about Denis Villeneuve’s new sci-fi space-encounter movie isn’t the aliens or the spaceships or the worldwide panic they bring on. It’s the fact that the hero is a linguistics professor!

It’s nice to feel that your seemingly esoteric field is actually the key to saving humankind. Even better if a film about it can get more people interested in the science of language structure. The film’s linguist, Louise Banks, played by Amy Adams, is charged with figuring out the language of the aliens who have landed on earth. She needs to do this in order to find out what they want.

How would one go about decoding a language that nobody knows? Field linguists—those who go out into the world to analyze little-known languages—have developed techniques for doing this kind of thing. The filmmakers consulted with McGill University linguist Jessica Coon, who herself has worked in the field on native languages of Mexico and Canada.

The problem of interpreting an unfamiliar language becomes a lot harder when dealing with creatures that don’t share our human bodies or articulators, much less a common frame of reality or physical environment, but that’s no reason not to start with the basics of linguistic communication that we do have a handle on. Here are four important concepts from linguistics that help Dr. Banks do the job she needs to do in Arrival.

1. THE SWADESH LIST

At one point Colonel Weber (played by Forest Whitaker) asks Dr. Banks why she’s wasting time with a list of simple words like eat and walk when their priority is to find out what the purpose of the aliens’ visit is. A good field linguist knows you can’t just jump to abstract concepts like purpose without establishing the basics first. But what are the basics?

For decades, linguists have used variations on the Swadesh list, a list of basic concepts first put together in the 1950s by linguist Morris Swadesh. They include concepts like I and you, one and many, as well as objects and actions in the observable world like person, blood, fire, eat, sleep, and walk. They were chosen to be as universal as possible, and they can be indicated by pointing or pantomime or pictures, which makes it possible to ask for their words before proper linguistic question-asking has been figured out. Though the movie’s heptapods likely don’t share most of our universal, earth-bound concepts, it’s as good a place to start as any.

2. DISCRETENESS

It might seem that the most important question to focus on when trying to analyze an unknown language is “what does this mean?” For a linguist, however, the most important question is “what are the units?” This is not because meaning is not useful, but because, while you can have meaning without language, you cannot have language without units. A sigh is meaningful, but not linguistic. It is not composed of discrete units, but an overall feel.

The concept of discreteness is one of the basic design features of human language. Linguistic utterances are patterns of combinations of smaller, meaningless units (sounds, or in the movie’s case, parts of ink blots) that reoccur in other utterances in different combinations with different meanings. When Dr. Banks sits down to analyze the circular ink blots the heptapods have thrown out, she marks up specific parts of them. She is not viewing them as analog, holistic pictures of meaning, but as compositions of parts, and she expects those parts to occur in other ink blots.

3. MINIMAL PAIRS

The concept of the minimal pair is crucial for figuring out what the units of a specific language are. An English speaker will say that car, whether it’s pronounced with a regular r or a rolled r, means the same thing (even if the rolled r sounds a bit strange). A Spanish speaker will say that caro means something different with a rolled r (caro “expensive” vs. carro “car”). The rolled r in English is just a different pronunciation of the same unit. In Spanish, it’s a different unit.

A minimal pair is a pair of words that differ in meaning because one sound has changed. The existence of a minimal pair shows that the differing sound is a crucial element of the language’s structure. In one scene in the movie, Dr. Banks notes that two ink blots are exactly the same except for a little hook on the end. That’s how she knows the hook does something important. With that knowledge, she can put it in the known inventory of units for heptapod, and look for it in other utterances.

4. THE SAPIR-WHORF HYPOTHESIS

The linguistic current running through the heart of the movie is a version of what’s come to be known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, most simply explained as the idea that the language you speak influences the way you think. This idea is controversial, since it has been demonstrated that languages do not restrict or constrain what people are able to perceive. However, a milder version of the theory holds that language can lay down default ways of categorizing experience that are easily shaken off if required.

We see the extreme version of Sapir-Whorf played out in the way that the perceptive abilities of Dr. Banks are completely transformed by the act of her learning the heptapod language. Her conception of time is altered by language.

The origins of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis trace back to an analysis by Benjamin Whorf of the concept of time in the Native American language Hopi. He argued that where the linguistic devices of European languages express time as a continuum from past to present to future, with time units like days, weeks, and years conceived of as objects, the Hopi language distinguishes only between the experienced and the not experienced, and does not conceive of stretches of time as objects. There are no days in Hopi, only the return of the sun.

Whorf’s analysis has been challenged by later Hopi scholars, but it is clear that the language does handle the idea of linguistic tense in a way that is difficult to grasp for speakers of European languages. Assuming that that means we live in a different reality with respect to time is taking things way too far. But who ever said the world of fiction wasn’t allowed to take things too far?

If you find the real ideas behind the movie intriguing, or just want to get more familiar with the exciting world of linguist-heroes, check out this collection of real world resources listed by Gretchen McCulloch.

Here’s something else to stress about for Thanksgiving: where to put the stress in the word Thanksgiving.

If you’re from California, Iowa, or Delaware, you probably say ThanksGIVing, with the primary stress on the second syllable. If you’re from Georgia, Tennessee, or the Texas panhandle, you probably say THANKSgiving, with the primary stress on the first syllable.

This north-south divide on syllable stress is found for other words like umbrella, guitar, insurance, and pecan. However, those words are borrowed from other languages (Italian, Spanish, French). Sometimes, in the borrowing process, competing stress patterns settle into regional differences. Just as some borrowed words get first syllable stress in the South and second syllable stress in the North, French words like garage and ballet get first syllable stress in the UK and second syllable stress in the U.S.

Thanksgiving, however, is an English word through and through. And if it behaved like a normal English word, it would have stress on the first syllable. Consider other words with the same noun-gerund structure just like it: SEAfaring, BAbysitting, HANDwriting, BULLfighting, BIRDwatching, HOMEcoming, ALMSgiving. The stress is always up front, on the noun. Why, in Thanksgiving alone, would stress shift to the GIVE?

The shift to the ThanksGIVing pronunciation is a bit of a mystery. Linguist John McWhorter has suggested that the loss of the stress on thanks has to do with a change in our concept of the holiday, that we “don’t truly think about Thanksgiving as being about thankfulness anymore.” This kind of thing can happen when a word takes on a new, more abstract sense. When we use outgoing for mail that is literally going out, we are likely to stress the OUT. When we use it as a description of someone’s personality (“She’s so outgoing!”), the stress might show up on the GO. Stress can shift with meaning.

But the stress shift might not be solely connected to the entrenchment of our turkey-eating rituals. The thanksGIVing stress pattern seems to have pre-dated the institution of the American holiday, according to an analysis of the meter of English poems by Mark Liberman at Language Log. ThanksGIVing has been around at least since the 17^th century. However you say it, there is precedent to back you up. And room enough to focus on both the thanks and the giving.

Thanksgiving originated as a way to celebrate, and enjoy, all the fruits and vegetables harvested this time of year. But the fall harvest doesn’t let word lovers go hungry, as it yields a cornucopia of etymological roots as well. Feast on the bounty of these seasonal word origins.

1. ARTICHOKE

Artichoke ultimately comes from the Arabic al-harshuf, “the artichoke.” The word, and plant, passed into Spanish, Italian, and then English, as archicokk, in the 1530s. Speakers tried to explain its unusual name with folk etymologies: The plant’s center would choke anyone who tried to eat it, or it chokes the growth of other plants in the garden. These folk beliefs are preserved in the modern spelling.

2. AND 3. SCALLION AND SHALLOT

Scallions and shallots may be two different species of onion, but they share a common root: the Vulgar Latin cepa escalonia, the “Ascalonian onion.” Ascalon is modern-day Ashkelon, an Israeli coastal city and a historically important seaport, apparently, for trading the likes of scallions and shallots. The Latin cepa, for onion, is also the source of another name for the scallion, chive.

4. ONION

If we peel back the etymological layers of onion, we find the Latin unio, which named both a pearl and a type of onion. Unio probably sprouts from unus, Latin for “one,” the idea being that this vegetable’s layers all comprise a single whole.

5. FENNEL

Fennel looks like an onion, but it’s actually in the carrot family. Appearances, though, are still the key to the origin of this word. Fennel, which is documented in English as early as 700, comes from a diminutive form of Latin faenum, for hay, which the plant’s feathery foliage and aroma evokes.

6. CARROT

Speaking of carrots, this orange vegetable is rooted in the Greek karaton. The origin of the Greek word is unclear. It could be from an Indo-European root ker, for horn, thanks to its shape. Ker could also mean head, possibly alluding to the way the carrot grows—and making a red-headed carrot-top etymologically redundant.

7., 8., 9., AND 10. KALE, COLLARD, KOHLRABI, AND CAULIFLOWER

These seasonal superfoods have a super-etymology. Latin had a word caulis, for stem, stalk, or cabbage, which produced quite the lexical bumper crop.

Old Norse borrowed caulis as kal, source of the word kale and the cole in coleslaw. In English, cole itself was an old word for cabbage as well as other leafy greens, like colewort, which American English speakers came to pronounce as collard, hence collard greens.

Kohlrabi literally means “cabbage-turnip” in German, cultivating its kohl from an Italian descendant of the original Latin caulis. And cauliflower, from Modern Latin cauliflora, is simply “cabbage flower.”

11. CABBAGE

If Latin’s caulis means cabbage, what does cabbage mean? Head, from the Old French caboce, in turn from the Latin caput. It doesn’t take too much imagination to understand why the Romans so named this heavy and round vegetable.

12. TURNIP

A turnip is a neep that looks like its been “turned” into its round shape, or so some etymologists guess. Neep comes from the Latin napus, a kind of turnip.

13. PARSNIP

This vegetable was once believed to be a kind of turnip, and so was made to look like turnip as a word. (The parsnip is actually related to the carrot while the turnip is related to the cabbage.) Parsnip stems from pastinaca, the Latin name for the vegetable, which may be related to pastinum, a two-pronged tool used to harvest tubers like parsnips.

14. AND 15. RADISH AND RUTABAGA

The roots of these roots are “roots.” Radish comes from the Latin radix, a root, both botanically and metaphorically, as we can see in derivatives like radical and eradicate. This radix, according to Indo-European scholars, grows from a more ancient soil: wrad, believed to mean root or branch. Wrad is featured in another vegetal word: rutabaga, which English took from the Swedish rotabagge by the 1780s. Rotabagge literally means “root bag,” with bag a kind of bundle in Old Norse.

16. and 17. PUMPKIN AND SQUASH

If you thought turnips and parsnips were all mixed up, then have a look at pumpkin. English immediately carved pumpkin out of French and Latin roots. The word’s ending, -kin, is influenced by a Germanic suffix for “little,” also seen in words like napkin. The ultimate root is the Greek pepon, meaning “ripe” and related to its verb for “cook.”

A Greek pepon was a kind of melon enjoyed when ripe. And the word melon, squashed from the Greek melopepon, literally means “ripe apple.” So, etymologically, a pumpkin is a melon, which is an apple. Early British colonists applied the word pumpkin—which, to make things more confusing, is technically a fruit—for the type of squash they encountered in the Americas.

Squash has nothing to do with smashing pumpkins. The word is shortened from the Algonquian askutasquash, literally “green things that may be eaten raw,” as the Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology glosses it.

18. POTATO

You say potato, I say batata. Christopher Columbus is said to have brought the word batata back from his voyages. The batata, probably from the Haitian Taíno language, was actually a kind of sweet potato. Later, Spanish conquistadors brought what we commonly think of as the potato back from South America, where it was called papa in the Quechuan language. Botanically, sweet potatoes and potatoes are completely unrelated, but that didn’t stop English speakers from confusing them by using the word potato as a common term.

19. YAM

Sweet potatoes aren’t a type of potato—and nor are they yams, even if we insist on calling them so. Yam crops up as inany in 1588, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, a borrowing of the Portuguese inhame or Spanish igname, possibly from a word in West African languages meaning “to eat.” Because of the slave trade, yam may have been directly borrowed from a West African language in American and Jamaican English.

20. BEET

Beet comes from the Old English bete, in turn from the Latin beta. These words just mean, for a refreshing change, beet. But even the humble beet has its baggage. The word was common in Old English but disappeared from the existing record until about the 1400s. It seems the English language didn’t much want to eat its vegetables in the late Middle Ages.

Curses! They’re fun to say, but not fun to deal with. But the lifting of the curse of the Cubs is a reminder that being cursed—whether by witchcraft, voodoo, or just some jerk—is an unavoidable, timeless part of life. Here are some older, out-of-use words for the next time you need to put the whammy on somebody. Use these imprecations with diabolical care.

1. DODGAST

This term—which is very similar to terms such as dadblasted and dagnabbit—is one of many euphemistic terms for blasphemous thoughts. The idea is that saying “God damn!” would just be wrong, but “Dodgast!” is just fine, because I guess God can’t decode euphemisms for some reason. An 1888 use from the Detroit Free Press voices a common sentiment: “It’s a dodgasted funny thing … but it’s a fact.”

2. WILLER

A willer wills something to happen—sometimes that involves ill will. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) records a few examples from around the 1500s that make the diabolical aspect of the word clear: evil-willer and cursed willer. Still, an evil-willer is better than an evil-doer.

3. AND 4. PIG-FACED LADY AND HOG-FACED GENTLEWOMAN

Now let’s take a break from causes and move to effects, the kind of effects that sound plausible if you believe a few evil words can produce an animal-human hybrid. As the OED puts it, a pig-faced lady is “a legendary woman of noble birth said to have been born with a pig’s face as the result of a curse; also known as the hog-faced gentlewoman.”

5. SAILOR’S FAREWELL

Since sailors are known for their salty language, it’s no surprise this is a euphemistic term for what is actually more of a fare-ill. This one has been around since at least the 1930s.

6. FLEMISH COMPLIMENT

Here’s a similarly understated term that’s insulting to a particular nationality. If you give someone a Flemish compliment, you’ve done just the opposite: cursed them, or at least buried them with verbal abuse. A dry use from 1847’s Settlers and Convicts shows this term in action: “The other hands never fail to pay the blunderer some very Flemish compliments.”

7. PLAGUEY

Though it sounds like a product of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, this (originally) quite literal term has been around since the 1500s. Anything plaguey caused the plague, was infected by the plague, or had a whole bunch of plaguiness going on. Then it gradually softened, not always referring to plagues but operating as a synonym for goddamn or confounded. This one turns up in the recent past, as seen in a 1990 use from Brisbane’s Sun newspaper: “Have someone pick a quarrel with the plaguey, superfluous little rascal.”

8. PUT THE BLIND ON

Green’s Dictionary of Slang—now available online—records this term in the 1990s. When you put the blind on, you put a curse on someone. Why blind? It appears to be a euphemism of bloody. Since the late 1900s, to blind was to swear, and there’s also the expression “Blind me!”

9. AND 10. GOOFER AND GOOFER DUST

A goofer is far from a goofball. The word, believed to derive from the Kikongo word kufwa, has meant “witch doctor” since the late 1800s. A goofer could also be a curse, and there’s a curser’s tool too: goofer dust, a powder used in hoodoo to cast a spell that can harm an individual.

A, E, I, O, U and sometimes Y is not all you need to know about vowels. There’s more to these workhorse members of our linguistics inventory than you might think.

1. ENGLISH HAS MORE VOWELS THAN THERE ARE LETTERS FOR THEM.

A, E, I, O, U and sometimes Y are the letters we define as vowels, but vowels can also be defined as speech sounds. While we have six letters we define as vowels, there are, in English, many more vowel sounds than that. For example consider the word pairs cat and car, or cook and kook. The vowel sounds are different from each other in each pair, but they are represented by the same letters. Depending on the dialect, and including diphthongs, which are combinations of two vowel sounds, English has from nine to 16 vowel sounds.

2. THE MOST COMMON VOWEL IS SCHWA.

The most common vowel sound in English doesn’t even have its own letter in the alphabet. It does have a symbol, though, and it looks like this: ǝ. It’s the “uh” sound in an unstressed syllable and it shows up everywhere, from th[ǝ], to p[ǝ]tato, to antic[ǝ]p[ǝ]tory. You can discover nine fun facts about it here.

3. YOUR SPANISH SOUNDS AMERICAN BECAUSE OF DIPHTHONGS.

In addition to pure vowel sounds, there are diphthongs, where the sound moves from one target to another. American English is full of them. The vowel in the American pronunciation of no is a diphthong that moves from o to u (if you say it in slow motion, your lips move from a pure o position to a pure u position). The vowel in the Spanish pronunciation is not a diphthong. It stays at o, and that what makes it sound different from the English version.

4. SOME SOUNDS CAN BE EITHER VOWELS OR CONSONANTS.

The u sound (pronounced “oo”) is a vowel. It allows an unrestricted airflow through the vocal apparatus. Consonants, in contrast, are created with a blockage of air flow, or point of constriction. A u sound can sometimes serve as that point of constriction, and it that case the u is considered a w. In the word blue, the u is the most open part of the syllable, and a vowel. In want it is the constriction before the main vowel, and thus a consonant. Similarly, an i (or “ee”) can also be a y, which helps explain why is Y a sometimes vowel.

5. MOST LANGUAGES HAVE AT LEAST THREE VOWELS.

Most languages have at least i, a, and u, or something close to them, though it may be the case that the extinct language Ubykh had only two vowels. It is hard to say what the highest number of vowels for a language is because there are features like vowel length, nasalization, tone, and voicing quality (creaky, breathy) that may or may not be considered marks of categorical difference from other sounds, but in general, 15 seems to be a pretty high number of distinct single vowels for a language. The International Phonetic Alphabet has symbols for 34 different vowels. You can listen to the different sounds they represent here.

6. SOME LANGUAGES REQUIRE VOWEL HARMONY.

In English, we can add an ending like –ness or –y onto any word and the form of the ending doesn’t change. I can say “the property of vowelness” or “his speech is very diphthongy.” In languages like Hungarian, the vowels of the ending must harmonize with the vowels in the word it attaches to. For example, the multiplicative ending, for forming words like twice, thrice, etc. is –szor when it attaches to a word with a back vowel (hatszor, “six times”), -szer when it attaches to a word with a front vowel (egyszer, “once”) and –ször when it attaches to a word with a front rounded vowel (ötször, “five times”). Other languages with vowel harmony are Turkish and Finnish.

7. TODAY’S ENGLISH IS THE RESULT OF MASSIVE CHANGE CALLED “THE GREAT VOWEL SHIFT.”

Many words we have today were pronounced very differently before the 14th century. Boot sounded more like boat, house sounded like hoos, and five sounded like feev. English underwent a major change in the 14th and 15th centuries. Words with long vowels shifted into new pronunciations. The changes happened in stages, over a few hundred years, but when they were complete, the language sounded very different, and spelling was a bit of a mess, since many spellings had been established during early phases of pronunciation. The change may have been initiated by the volume of French words that entered English shortly before the shift, or by the movement of populations with different dialects during the Black Plague.

8. YOU DON’T NEED ALL THE VOWELS TO WRITE A NOVEL.

In 1969, George Perec, a member of the French experimental literature group known as Oulipo published La Disparition, a 300-page novel written only with words that did not contain the letter e. It was published in English as A Void, also without using the letter e. The Spanish translation, El Secuestro, used no a. Works created with this kind of restriction are called lipograms, explained here in an e-less lipogram.

It’s human nature to conceive of abstract ideas through more immediate, concrete experiences—which is to say, through metaphors. Most of the words we have for abstract concepts began this way. We can still find evidence of these originating metaphors in the etymological history of our words. Here are 15 of them hidden in words where we may not see them anymore.

1. COMPANION

The central root of companion is pan– from the Latin for bread. Com is from the word for “with.” A companion is a “with bread person,” a person you break bread with.

2. EXPLAIN

Explain comes from ex planare, or “out flatten.” When you explain something you flatten it out for inspection, so the meaning is laid out clearly for viewing.

3. REMORSE

The morse in remorse is from mordere, “to bite” (also found in the word morsel). When you have remorse over something, it is returning to bite at you.

4. NORMAL

In classical Latin, a norma was a carpenter’s square, used for confirming straight, right angles. To be normal is to be in accordance with the norma, to fit into the standard measurement.

5. EXPIRE

In Latin, spirare is “to breathe.” To ex spirare is to breathe out. When something expires, it has breathed out its last breath.

6. DEPEND

Pendere is to hang. It is also the root of pendulum. De- is “from,” so to depend is to hang from. When something depends on something else, it hangs from it, at its mercy if it should let go.

7. DISCORD

The cord in discord is from the Latin word for heart. When there is discord, hearts are divided or separated from each other.

8. IMPEDE

The –pede, also found in centipede and millipede, comes from the Latin for foot. Something that is impeded cannot go; its feet are entangled or otherwise obstructed.

9. INFANT

Fant is the past participle of fari, to speak. To be infant is to be non-speaking or unable to speak. The word captures a salient characteristic of babies and very young children.

10. HUMILITY

In Latin, humus is the earth, the soil, the ground (also seen in exhume, to bring something out of the ground). Humility is the characteristic of being low to the ground, and to humiliate is to bring someone to that low level.

11. OBVIOUS

Obvious comes from a joining of ob- (toward, against, in front of) and via (way, road). When something is obvious it is right there, in the way of you, in front of you in the road. You can’t miss it.

12. VERDICT

Dict is the past participle of the Latin dire, to speak or say. And ver- is the root for truth. A verdict is proclamation of a decision reached after judging the evidence, a saying of the truth.

13. IMMINENT

The Latin verb minere is to hang over or jut out. Something that is in minere, or imminent, is hanging over or jutting out so much that it is about to fall.

14. EDUCATE

The heart of this word is the root ducere, to lead. Appended to the front is e-, a shortened version of ex-, meaning “out.” To educate is to lead out. Two metaphorical views are possible, one where the student is being led out of ignorance, and another where the potential of the student is being led out by the process of education.

15. PREPOSTEROUS

Preposterous combines pre-, meaning “before” and post-, meaning “after.” To be preposterous is to be before the after, or all out of order, which is a preposterous state to be in.