Armadillo World Headquarters

Once upon a wonderful time, I frequented a place perfectly named Armadillo World Headquarters.  It was sort of a cross between Woodstock and your neighborhood block party.  If you scan the list of artists (and if you're old enough) you'll see that some of the greatest names of the Rock'nRoll era also frequented the place.  This army of musicians created harmonies that still waft around in my head today.  AWHQ only lasted a decade, but what a decade it was! 

But this is a blog about words, right?  Alrighty then, let's go back to that first paragraph and find a family of words to work with.  How about these: armadillo, army, artist, harmony.  To that list we could add arthritis and aristocracy.  Pretty diverse family, eh? 

What do these words all have in common?  Let's start with our mascot, the armadillo.  I've caught a couple of these suckers in the wild.  Trust me, it isn't easy and holding onto them is almost as tough as catching them.  Armadilloes have a shell-like armature (hmmm) that fully protects them when they roll up into a defensive ball.  I would imagine that getting the design just right took a lot of work.  If any piece of the shell doesn't fit perfectly, it could be pretty uncomfortable in there.  And that's the key: fit.

Our IE root today is ar - to fit.  Armadilloes have an armature that fits.  If you are in the army, you'd better have good fitting armor which you pick up at the armory*.  An artist fits sounds or colors or shapes together in some sort of harmonious way.  Our joints are where our body parts fit together and where arthritis can develop.  Aristocracy?  Oh I don't know, I guess they think they are the only ones who fit in!

I'd like to list a few more words, but right now I'm going back to the AWHQ artist list and continue my walk down memory lane.  Maybe I'll find additions to my greatest songs list.

* When I started this post, I had no idea that AWHQ found its residence in a former armory.  Note this from the wiki article on AWHQ: The name for Armadillo World Headquarters was inspired by the use of armadillos by a local poster artist and from the building itself. In choosing the mascot for the new venture, the founder and his partners wanted an "armored" animal since the building was an old armory. The nine-banded armadillo was chosen because of its hard shell that looks like armor.

Matters of Heart and Home

This one is sweet and simple... well sort of. 

A building is called an edifice.  When you build someone up, you edify them.  So you, a rational person, would suppose that the ancient root leading to edifice / edify has something to do with building or structure, right?  No chance.

In this case, our IE root is ai and I'm telling you the truth, it means "to burn".  (Ember and Sicily's Mt Etna volcano are also related.)  Edifice and edify get their e- sound from the ai root.  But that still doesn't explain how we get from burn to build.

Maybe this will help.  I confess that I grew up watching Little House On The Praire.  (I had a crush on Melissa Gilbert).  I remember Pa Ingalls getting up from the dinner table, grabbing his pipe, and lighting it with an ember (hey, remember ember!) from the fire.  Then, standing there at the hearth, he would talk to his wife and children in ways that edified them.  And that's it. (Notice what is behind the girls in the picture.)

Well, let me unpack this for you.  For millennia, the most important part of the home was the fireplace where the home is heated and food is cooked.  Nowadays, there is some demon-possessed machine in the basement that does the heating job and our fireplaces are primarily decorative - but those are only recent "improvements".  The house (edifice) was literally built up around the fireplace or hearth.  And Pa Ingalls vividly demonstrated that family is built up (edified) there at the core of the home - the fireplace or hearth.

Ready for this?  The Latin word for hearth is eides - clearly growing up from our ancient root ai.  There where the burning happens, the core of the edifice is formed and family members are edified.  It's all true.

Grist for the Mill

Did you ever wonder if “Christ” was the last name of Jesus - as if Joseph and Mary Christ had a baby named Jesus?  Or why is *He* sometimes referred to as Jesus and sometimes as Christ.  It really is understandable that there would be some confusion abouth this conspicuous person and name. 

There is an important word in the Bible in both the Old and New Testament: Anointed.  Think "ointment" - you put it on your body.  To be anointed is to have olive oil (the ointment) placed on you, typically on the forehead.  Tradition holds that prophets, priests, and kings were anointed as a way of marking that they were set apart for their special role.  Most Christians believe that Jesus was all three: prophet, priest, and king, but that's another subject altogether. 

The Old Testament (Hebrew) word for "the anointed one" is Messiah.  The New Testament (Greek) word for "the anointed one" is Christ.  Okay, so the Messiah or the Christ is anointed with olive oil.  How is that oil obtained? By pressing or grinding the olive until the the oil runs out.

Historically, we process wheat similarly – by grinding it between heavy stones in a mill.  The term “grist for the mill” refers to the grain which is poured into the mill and ground. I think you can see that grist is directly, and obviously, related to Christ.  In fact, the ancient IE root is ghrendh - not a lot of distance between ghrendh and grind, is there?  The word Christ, as noble a name as Christians believe that it is, simply refers to the process by which the anointing oil is obtained.

It is noteworthy that Jesus' most difficult moment was in a place called Gethsemane on the night before His crucifixion.  There He felt like He was being figuratively ground between the stone of God's will His own human inclination to avoid suffering.  (In Luke 22:42 we hear Jesus expressing His conflict, "Not my will, but Thine be done.")  Did you ever look up what Gethsemane means?  Olive press.  It is your host's opinion that in every way, Jesus lived up to the title Christ.

Both Sides Now

I'm writing this entry during the 2010 Winter Olympics.  The opening ceremony on Feb 12 featured a song that takes me back forty years - more or less.  I can't find video from the Olympics, so please check out this wonderful performance by the song's writer and first voice - Joni Mitchell.  Joni says she has come to see both sides now of love and a good many other things.  An important perspective.

The idea of considering both (or all) sides is deeply rooted in language.  The IE root is ambhi meaning "from both sides" or often meaning "around".   What do you call an animal, say a frog, that can live in both water and on land?  Amphibios (both + biomes / habitats).  What do you call an offical that represents one side to the other?  Ambassador.  (An interesting cousin of ambassador is "ombudsman" - a person who represents the interests of one side to the other.  Colleges, newpapers, etc have ombudsmen to make sure that the little people are not getting steamrolled by the institution.)

Sometimes words wind up with almost the opposite of their original meaning.  Some day I'll talk about "apologize" - a great example of words taking a permanent Opposite Day.  Today, let's focus on ambivalent.  Usually, if you like to use big words, you would say you were ambivalent if you didn't have a preference between two options.  It almost means apathetic.  But, at its heart, ambivalent means to be "valiant" (strong) for both sides.  If you are ambivalent, you could fight for either side with equal vigor.

One word in this family that you'll probably never hear (and definitely never use) is perambulate (per = through + amb = both + ulate = walk).  It means simply to walk around on all sides.  Although you may never use the word, if you were British you'd use a contraction of it all the time.  When you're ready to take the baby for a walk all around the park, you'd get out the pram (serious contraction!).

Now, I've got one more for you and it's a doozy.  Take a couple deep breaths, splash your face with cold water, maybe get a jolt of joe, and let's do this.  Hmmmm, let's see how shall we do this?  Okay, if you get real sick or need an operation, you go to the... hospital.  That's a cool word related to host and hospitality; you see that.  If you can't make it to the hospital what do you do?  You ask the hospital to come to you.  Nowadays, we have fantastic motorized hospitals with tandem rear wheels and flashing red lights.  But before Karl Benz invented the automobile (and named it after his daughter, Mercedes), the hospital came walking to you.  The French call it the hôspital ambulant - the walking hospital.  Now isn't that the way words work?  Hospital is the key part of the phrase hôspital ambulant, otherwise it would just be a pram.  But when we shorten phrases, especially foreign terms we don't understand, we often drop the important part and keep the details.  The next time you get passed by an ambulance going 70 miles per hour, stick your head out the window and laugh haughtily, "Ha, you should be walking."  On second thought, don't.

Fables of Famous Fairies and Blasphemous Bandits

To start this post, I'm going to try and teach just a moment about how one ancient sound (root) can wind up going so many different (and apparently unrelated) directions.  Take the root: bha(2).  Before we discuss its meaning, let's consider what this root could wind up sounding like.  Drop the h and you have the ba sound.  Keep the h and turn the b upside down to p (happens all the time) and you have pha / fa.  Of course, the vowel sounds are always complete wild cards.  Regional accents usually mess with the vowels.  For example, In Texas, if you want your iced tea all the way to the top of the glass, you say "feel it up", but you mean "fill".  So keep an eye on the consonant sounds and just let the vowels come and go as they please.  Our IE root today, bha, will clearly demonstrate this kind of sonic ADD.

At it's heart, bha is a real big talker - it means "to speak".  We speak to tell a fable and sometimes our fables speak of the antics of fairies (characters in spoken fables).  Fables often tell lessons through the fates of the actors (fate meaning a spoken outcome).  A baby just learning to speak is an infant, a guy who talks a lot is called affable, and some people (especially among the elderly) suffer aphasia - the inability to speak.  I think you can see that famous (spoken of far and wide) and fabulous (spoken highly of) fandangoes (no clue!) are also downstream cousins of ancient bha.

When we speak of our beliefs we confess what we believe.  If we speak against what others believe they say we blaspheme.

If we don't like something and want to run it out of town, we ban it and bannish it (see, we dropped the h).  Even though it got banned, some people still seek contraband with reckless abandon.  If those naughty boys call (speak) a bunch of their kind together, we call them bandits.

If we hold onto the ph/f sound and listen for the o sound, we'll discover the very core of spoken word sounds - phonics and phonetics.  Of course, to speak at a distance we need a telephone (far + sound).  If musical instrument sounds all come together just right we enjoy the symphony (together + sound).

Let's Rename The Place After Our Guests

It strikes me as humorous that England is named after an obscure piece of land 400 miles from it's own shores.  Do you remember your world history class in high school (it was the one with the overly flirtatious girl in it - yeah, that one)?  Remember tales of the Jutes, Angles, Saxons and other historic clans of derring-do?  These folks lived in Northern Europe and had eager aspirations to export their culture to distant lands.  The Angles lent their name to a newly conquered colony we now call... wait for it... England.

No small contribution, England and English are two of the most common proper nouns on the globe.  The word "English" gets 1.8 billion hits on a Google search (by way of comparison, "love" only got 1.4 billion hits).  The English language is the second most commonly spoken language in the world with 480 million tongue-waggers.  (Variants of Chinese is most common with about 1 billion speakers, but English is the most common second-language learned, adding another 600 million speakers.  So, yeah, English is a pretty big deal.)

But this isn't a blog about language, this is about word roots.  Let's get to the botton of it, where did those ambitious old Angles get their name.  Stop right there!  Did you notice something?  "Angles"  That's like "angle", right?  You know, the corners of a shape.  Right?  Right!

The Angles of yore got their name from the shape of their homeland (which is now part of Germany, at the northern tip on the Baltic Sea).  That's it.  Note this image of the ancient Angle homeland.  Apparently, the original land was mapped from Flensburg to Schleswig to Kappeln, creating an angular (there it is again) shape on a map.  The people who lived in an angle-shaped land were called Angles.  It's funny really.  One of the most common words and languages on the planet comes from a quirky shape of land roughly the size of New York City.  (It's kind of like asking people from Michigan where they live.  They hold up a hand and say, "I'm from right here" and point to a knuckle on their ring finger.  Michigan is shaped like a mitten - we should call the place Mittenland.  They act like it, after all.)

That's it.  England is named for the people who live on a piece of land shaped like a angle.  But we can take this just a little further - that's the fun of it!  Look at the map again, look just north of Kappeln.  Notice that little bay that is formed by the hook of land on the east?  Hook... Hey, what's that fancy word for fishermen?  Angler, that's it.  Why are fishers call anglers?  Because of what is at the end of their line - an angle.  That little angle-shaped hook lent its name to the whole sport.

Let's see what's left in the botton of the barrel here.  Oh yes, can you think of an angle-shaped part of your body?  Let's stay on task, think about the bottom of your leg - your... wait for it... ankle.  Yup.  Same deal.  Your leg turns an angle to get to your foot, so just call it that.

All these words, from England to ankle, derive from an ancient IE root ank meaning angle.  Pretty straightforward, pardon the pun.

We Have Seen His Star In The East

The magi who came to see the newborn Jesus in Bethlehem announced that when they were in the east, they saw His star. In a way, they were a little redundant. Let's break this down. There is an IE root meaning to shine - aus. Now ask yourself what shines brightest in our world? The sun - a star. aus is at the heart of star. But how were the wise men redundant? In what direction does the sun rise? The east. aus is also at the heart of east. (Over the course of these posts we'll discover many words that derive from "the place where the shining thing rises".)

Would it surprise you to learn that Austria derives it's name from the fact that it lay to the east of most of Europe? (Wait 'til I tell you how England got its name!) It is very clear that our old friend aus didn't have to put on any verbal make-up at all to take the starring (oh, pardon the pun) role in Austria.

Aurora also is a glowing thing and derives from aus.

To wrap up this short post, let's go back to the baby Jesus. The story unfolds that Jesus lived until he was about 33 years old and then was crucified in Jerusalem and was then resurrected three days later. In the Christian world, the annual celebration of His return to the living is known as Easter. Easter is a hopelessly pagan term. It derives ultimately from aus, but more recently from Austron, a goddess of fertility whose feast was celebrated at the Spring equinox (roughly at the same time as the annual celebration of Christ's resurrection). It was the habit of early Christianity (specifically Catholicism) to take pagan celebrations and infuse them with Christian content, meaning, and symbolism. In this case, Resurrection Sunday got re-labelled Easter.

Christmas and Easter are both tied to the same IE Root: aus.