Complex Numbers

Other Stuff We Don't Know

On this, the darkest and gloomiest day of the darkest and gloomiest month (yes, I know that, technically, in this hemisphere, December is darker and gloomier, and the solstice is the darkest and gloomiest, but metaphorically, it's today), I have an article from Cracked that's about words, a light to pierce the dark gloom.

    5 Language Mysteries No One’s Been Able to Solve  

There exist, of course, far more than five. But at least these are five I hadn't heard of before.

Imagine if words didn’t mean what you think they do. You read a news report about some victim being murdered by a succubus, but what if a succubus isn’t really a demon? What if it’s some special type of Golden Retriever? With some old words, especially those that have been clumsily translated, we’re just taking shots in the dark.

Words often don't mean what people think they mean. You hear or read a word and, usually, you're too lazy to look it up in a dictionary (even now, when a dictionary involves simply typing or pasting the unknown word into a search engine). So you go from context. And sometimes, you get it wrong, and get laughed at. Other times, you use a word the correct way, and you get laughed at because everyone else thinks it means something different. "Decimate," e.g.

Anyway, the list:

5. What Does ‘Our Daily Bread’ Mean Anyway?

We used to have a bakery here called Le Pain Quotidien. Apparently, it was part of a chain (which I didn't know), and the chain was Belgian, not French. Whatever, even before I started learning French, I wondered if they were going for the Biblical reference, why not "Notre Pain Quotidien" instead? Maybe because it would confuse English speakers. That's never stopped the French, but it might give Belgians pause.

I don't miss it; there's a much better bakery in town, and one of my great thrills in life is to go in there and pronounce their offerings "pain de campagne" and "croissant" in the French way. (I'm easily amused.)

One story from the Bible tells of the time Jesus taught his followers how to pray. When you pray, said Jesus, you shouldn’t just go on repeating some set words...

His followers wrote down the words he said and repeated them verbatim for the next 2,000 years. They taught the prayer to their children, who would learn to recite it long before they had any idea what such phrases like “thy will be done” means. This is the opposite of what Jesus told them to do, but that’s organized religion for you.

And don't get me started on indoctrinating schoolchildren with the Pledge of Allegiance, starting when they're too young to know what "pledge" or "allegiance" (not to mention "republic" and "indivisible") mean.

That prayer is called the “Our Father” or “The Lord’s Prayer.” Though, people today don’t use the exact words that were said millennia ago, because not too many people speak Aramaic anymore.

Fun fact: some Jewish prayers are in Aramaic.

Other fun fact: Catholics, at least, were okay with using Latin for that prayer right up until the 20th century, and I'm pretty sure there are some orders who ignore Vatican II.

But I digress. This section points out that the word which is commonly translated as "our daily bread" might mean something else entirely.

Or maybe it said, “Give us this day our garlic bread.” That’s a prayer to unite people of all faiths.

4. One Mystery Verse of Dante’s ‘Inferno’

Education means different things in different eras. Today, to be a properly educated scholar of culture, you need to be able to explain where every Disney remake went wrong, even though you have never watched any of them and rightly never intend to. In the past, in certain circles, an educated person was someone who’d studied Greek and Latin.

Also, you need to know the convoluted overarching plot of all the Star Wars properties, as well as the various timelines of Star Trek. Not to mention Monty Python movies, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and several others.

Perhaps you would have to translate the ancient works of Virgil, which sounds hard.

It is hard. Third and fourth year Latin in high school, as far as I can recall, was all about studying Virgil's Aenid.

Much easier, surely, would be translating a poem written 1,300 years after Virgil, featuring Virgil as a character.

Confession time: I've never read the Divine Comedy. Not even a translation.

But then you’d come upon a verse that goes like this: Raphèl mai amècche zabì almi. What does that mean?

We don’t know. It’s not Italian. Nor is it any other language we know of. The character who says it is Nimrod, a hunter from the Bible guarding the ninth circle of hell, and it seems like this line of his may be gibberish.

Even the name of Nimrod has changed meaning, thanks to Bugs Bunny. Pretty sure I've touched on that subject in here before.

In any case, the article speculates, but their guess is as good as yours.

3. The Vowel Vow of the Royal Habsburgs

The Hapsburgs, starting with King Frederick III in the 15th century, used the following motto: “A.E.I.O.U.”

This is what passed, in the 15th century, for wordplay.

Could mean a lot of things, but as the section notes:

Let’s be sure to keep an eye on any man born in Austria. Some of them seem to harbor sinister ambitions.

2. Who the Devil Is Betsy?

“Heavens to Betsy!” says the old exclamation. It’s a way of expressing shock. Descriptions of this idiom liken it to “for heaven’s sake,” a phrase that began as a euphemism...

I don't think this requires that much analysis. Betsy is, or was, a common nickname for Elizabeth, one of the most common girly names, along with about a thousand other nicknames like "Beth" or "Liz" or "Betty," not to mention variants in myriad other languages. The name Elizabeth is now synonymous with royalty, but like many other names of European origin, it derives from Hebrew via the Bible. And in Hebrew, the name (which was Aaron's wife's and John the Baptist's mama's name, though those were probably two different women given the centuries separating them) means something like "God is my oath." Combine that with the way "Heavens to Betsy" just rolls off the tongue, and you have a near-perfect minced oath.

Other speculations abound at the link.

1. Is Copacetic a Word at All?

Of course it's a word. Sure, someone made it up. This is the case with all words. Some were simply made up longer ago than others.