Complex Numbers

Secretion

"Blog Week Birthday Bastion 2024"   [13+] by WakeUpAndLive~doingNaNo'24

Prompt 6. Sept 6.

Nothing makes us so lonely as our secrets. Paul Tournier
Can you share a secret? Small or big, tell us. No? Tell us why not.

No.

...well, now I have to come up with at least 299 more words.

I'm pretty open in here, I think, though there are some things I edge around in an effort to avoid potential problems. This blog is public, though, so once I share something here, it can no longer be considered a "secret" in a literal sense of the word. So asking me to share a secret in here is the same as asking me to destroy it.

Some things were told to me in confidence by other people, and those aren't mine to disclose. If I'm ever in doubt about whether someone else's words to me are confidential or not, I assume they are. So those aren't getting discussed.

Ever wonder, though, why "secretary" contains the word "secret?" That's not an accident. While the word has largely fallen out of favor in the business world due to sexist connotations, replaced by "office assistant" or some similar term, a secretary is, historically, someone entrusted with secrets. The word survives in government administration, like with the Secretary of State in the US, or the UN's Secretariat. I suppose we didn't want to go with "minister" like in the UK or other countries, despite its inclusion in "administer."

How the word "secretary" got applied to desks with top shelves is still a mystery to me. Perhaps it was because secretaries tended to use such desks for organization, while a boss's desk is traditionally shelf-free, as they had secretaries to do all the filing and such. Or it might be used there in the sense not of "secret," but of "secrete," as in hiding, filing, or secreting stuff away. In yet another example of English's weirdness, "secrete" can also mean to ooze forth, like... well, you know what I'm talking about; unless you're a biologist, it's usually considered disgusting.

But the noun and verb are etymologically related.

I suppose it's no secret that when I can't think of anything else to say about a subject, I retreat into etymology. Most word origins are traced back to Latin or Greek, but even Latin and Greek built on earlier languages. It's just that the further back in time you go, the fewer written records survive, so it's tough to trace everything back to what linguists call Proto-Indo-European, or PIE, the apparent source of most Western languages.

But language probably got invented long before PIE, and it's even tougher to peer back into that ancient time. The past holds many secrets, and we will probably never expose them all.

We get to give out a free Merit Badge every day this week. Want one? Anyone who comments here before 11:30 pm WDC time today could get today's. (I'll need that extra half-hour to pick a winner and send the badge before midnight.)

To clarify:

When I say "comment," I mean comment. Not review. Though reviews are always welcome.
I also mean "here," not on the newsfeed post.
MB recipient will be chosen at random.
Maximum of one MB per commenter for the week.
If I don't get comments, I'll pick a previous commenter, and maybe not at random.
The MB will be the one I commissioned two years ago, "Complexity," which is a publicly available MB.
I appreciate all comments; this is just a little incentive.