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wombat1138 ([personal profile] wombat1138) wrote2006-02-22 02:11 am
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Weird etymologies

After encountering "fungible" in Sunday's Dilbert just before we headed out for lunch, I thoroughly annoyed the wombat-consort by making him explain the word to me, since I didn't recall having seen it before and hadn't had time to look it up. (Also, I think Scott Adams is definitely turning into an asshole, on which more later.)

As I'd thought, it's from the same Latin root as "function", though until I hit Cassell's just now, I'd forgotten it was actually a deponent verb: fungor, fungi, functus sum, not *fungo, fungere etc. So "functionally equivalent" is more or less, um, fungible with "fungible". However, the word "fungus" comes from a completely different root, having originated as a poetic cognate from the same Greek root as "sponge", the squooshiness of which IIRC also relates to the Sphinx (which Graves glossed as "strangler", modulo his usual sodium content) as well as "sphincter". (Ahem.)

(While I can kinda see Adams' argument, it's pitched on a completely different level than the way my brain cell operates. Maybe it's just me, but if I were going to buy a hybrid car, geopolitical economics would be somewhere down my list of reasons behind "I won't have to spend as much of my own personal money on gasoline." And once fuel-efficent technology improves to a certain level, that's likely to be the most popular reason for spreading to a nation/world-wide level, not counting the conspicuous-consumption Hummer hordes. Of course, then you end up with interesting supply/demand seesaws if there's a sufficient decrease in fuel demand to depress its price, thus decreasing the sense of consumer urgency for convservation, but hey.)

And then there's the Japanese slang term yanki(i), often transliterated as "Yankee" as an easy assumption at its source-- it refers to a certain type of bad-behavior kids who often sport bleached-blond hair. However, according to a conflicting etymology which feels better to me somehow, it's actually a purely Japanese formation based on Kansai-ben, in which the already-informal negative copula ja nai (from de wa nai) may get further clipped to yan, perhaps immediately followed by the sentence-final Kansai-ben particle ke whose significance I have thoroughly forgotten, though now I wonder if it's related to Inuyasha's favorite exclamation, "Keh!" So the initial form was supposedly yanke, which eventually morphed into the adjective yanki(i). Not that it really matters, but the Kansai-ben explanation just seems so much more interesting.

And finally, last fall there was an article in The Economist about Japanese age demographics whose online archive doesn't seem to have all of the charts I remember. Among other discontinuities, such as the sharp drop in the age group (especially males) born around 1920, there was a sharp single-year dip for the birth year 1966. While I'd remembered Kittredge Cherry's essay in Womansword about the dread of Fire Horse women, somehow I hadn't really believed her about just how much reluctance there was from prospective parents to give birth to such a child. It was somewhat reassuring to see that the gender ratio was normal among the relatively few Fire Horse births in Japan, though I'm not sure how much that was attributable to the unavailability of prenatal gender-checking, or whether the hinoeuma stigma applies to boys as well-- when we were at my parents' house for the holidays, I noticed a novel whose blurb's invocation of the destructive passions of Fire Horses seemed to be applying them to a male protagonist, which I found rather funny since my brother was born in 1966.

(Rurouni Kenshin's Yukishiro Tomoe would've been born in the antepenultimate batch of hinoeuma. He really should've known she'd be trouble :b )

Addendum: another Japanese slang term, otemba, also describes unruly women; despite its close similarity to the English "tomboy", it's actually from the Dutch ontembaar, which describes a wild horse which can't be broken. ("You can tame a dog with food. You can tame a man with money. But nothing can tame a horse of the Fire Year"? There's gotta be some better translation for the verb Saitou used, whose meaning seems to be somewhere between "tame/train a wild animal" and "raise a child" iirc, but maybe there isn't and I don't.)

[identity profile] wombat1138.livejournal.com 2006-03-01 07:09 pm (UTC)(link)
But I dunno. Within a year, you've gone through every part of the year. So why would the formative experiences be substantially different?

'Zacly. What the heck is the natural twelve-year cycle (or for the finer-grained version, sixty-year cycle) that would have enough physical effect (at least in China) to be *noticed*, much less shape people's personalities? Sunspots? Sandstorms? Precessional wobble? El Niño monsoons?

(I've got a book somewhere about Chinese geomancy, published before the recent feng shui craze, which describes actual wayback reasons for some of the precepts after all-- facing the house away from the dusty winds sweeping in from the Mongol steppe; arranging the solar exposure to shelter the house from summer heat but maximize passive heating in winter, and so on.)

[identity profile] qadgop.livejournal.com 2006-03-01 08:04 pm (UTC)(link)
I've got a book somewhere [....]

Now that makes more sense. But then, culturally speaking, in the long run the reasonable explanations for how a custom gets started probably don't matter. In at least some ways, kosher food preparation makes logical sense, at least what with the cleanliness, but I doubt that's generally seen as the point of it. (It's not as though it help avoid cholesterol, after all.)

[identity profile] wombat1138.livejournal.com 2006-03-02 12:48 am (UTC)(link)
Mmm. ISTR reading somewhere that in many cases, when Jewish immigrants came to the US, opened delicatessens, and were introduced to the concept of mayonnaise, the weird new substance looked so suspiciously creamy that they didn't completely trust it to be pareve instead of milchig, and therefore discreetly substituted schmaltz into recipes in its place.

Speaking of which, at some point I was cooking down some chicken scraps and thought, "There's got to be a word for the stuff that's left over from making schmaltz," and almost immediately followed it up with the word(?) "gribnitz". However, gribnitz doesn't "seem to exist in that spelling in any of my books, though after a while I turned up the form gribenes. How the hell did the spelling "gribnitz" get lodged in my brain cell in the first place?

Dammit. Now I'm hungry.

[identity profile] qadgop.livejournal.com 2006-03-02 03:23 am (UTC)(link)
Truthfully, I've never heard of gribnitz. But, being culturally illiterate, I also only know schmaltz as "that oh-God-this-Yiddish-song-is-so-corny feeling," rather than as a foodstuff.

Tomorrow I get to get yelled at by my doctor for getting too much General Tso's Chicken in my blood cholesterol, meanwhile.