It's been a long time since I fed this BackWords blog, so let's make this entry count. Here at BackWords, I try to show connections between word cousins who have branched off the family tree in various directions at various times. I base my musings on ancient root words, some of which are extinct, but their word limbs and leaves are doing just fine.
Today's ancient root is gwher which means to heat or be warm. The pronunciation of the root is not as important as watching the elements of it morph. The r in the back half of the root is not going to change, or even move. But boy, that front half is hopping on a word roller-coaster. Let's go along for the ride with it.
Let's start with heat itself, how do we measure temperature? With a thermometer. The gwh picked up the th sound and adds the r sound. You carry your coffee in a Thermos and drink it to prevent hypothermia. The Greek town of Thermopylae was the site of a hot springs.
In the history of words, th sounds don't object at all to being pronounced as ph or f sounds. So we get a f-r sound to refer to hot things like furnace and we pick up hot items with forceps. Want to get down and dirty? What if I told you that fornicate finds a home in this family tree? I think we see how heat and warmth attach to the idea of human intimacy. This is a G-rated blog, don't make me spell it out for you.
As words sounds wind their way through history, it's pretty common for the p in the ph sound to just flip upside down. p becomes b. Where we just met a bunch of ph-r or f-r sounds, now we have a great big family of b-r words.
With the exception of three historical characters, toss anything in the furnace and it gets burned. Brandy is literally "burnt wine"... and it will make you feel warm inside.
I'm especially fond of cattle brands (but I promise I have never branded a cattle). A brand makes a mark by burning flesh. (In the modern world, a corporate brand is simply the company's mark, how they are identified in the marketplace.) Before man put iron brands in the fire, he (or she) simply burned wood. Fire not only provided warmth and cooked food, but a fire also provided protection. A lonely hunter/gatherer confronted with a pack of wily coyotes would lift up a log - a firebrand - and brandish it about, hopefully dispelling the danger. Today, the cops keep on the lookout for folks brandishing a weapon - waving around a gun or knife just like our ancestors brandished burning logs.
I've taken a recent interest in the art of sculpting. A skilled artist will create a thing of beauty from humble clay... and then the magic begins. A forge (an over-achieving furnace) (hailing from our ph/f-r root) will almost burn a particular kind of metal - bronze (hailing from our b-r root). Bronze is poured into a mold and once cooled, the bronze can be burnished until it takes on a warm glow.
Pretty cool, I mean warm.
