“I’ll see you soon.” “We’ll be there in a few.” “Be right there!” All of these are vague promises that you’ll be arriving at a particular place in a short period of time, but one similar phrase, “be there in a jiffy,” isn’t quite so vague. It’s been adopted as an idiomatic phrase that implies you’ll be there shortly, but “jiffy” actually refers to a defined period of time.
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A jiffy is a concrete, measurable unit (that still varies, depending on the context). Some scientists use “jiffy” to denote a very, very tiny amount of time. To physicists, a jiffy is how long it takes for light to travel one femtometer (a millionth of a millionth of a millimeter). Femtometers are used to measure things smaller than an atom, so you can imagine how short a jiffy is. In electrical contexts, “jiffy” is used to measure the length of a single cycle of alternating current, where one jiffy equals 17 milliseconds. In computer science, “jiffy” is a variable term, equaling anywhere from one to 10 milliseconds.
There are many such terms that are far more specific than common usage indicates. Promising you’ll be back in a “few shakes,” for instance, is pretty impossible. In the world of physics, a shake is a unit used to measure one step of a nuclear chain reaction that equals 10 nanoseconds (10 billionths of a second). While these words have specific meanings in a scientific or technical context, they’ve been adopted as idioms. While you may not be traveling at the speed of light in a jiffy, folks will still understand your intent.
Bennett Kleinman is a New York City-based staff writer for Optimism. He is also a freelance comedy writer, devoted New York Yankees and New Jersey Devils fan, and thinks plain seltzer is the best drink ever invented.
The English of 200 years ago would sound remarkably familiar to modern speakers. Let’s explore how the American accent evolved and how things were different in the 1820s.
A lot has changed since 1824; back then, there were only 24 stars on the American flag, Beethoven had just debuted his Symphony No. 9, and people often spent their free time reading and gardening instead of watching “Love Island” and scrolling social media. But for all the differences, one thing has remained pretty stable over the past 200 years: how the English language sounds.
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If you hopped in your hypothetical time machine, you might be shocked at how similar 200-year-old English sounds compared to now. By the 1820s, many English-speaking Americans had begun to drop the British accent that was more common in Colonial America during the 18th century, and American English was developing as distinct from the Queen’s English. (If you went back 400 years, Shakespearean English would be much more difficult to understand.) An 1824 person would likely have no difficulty communicating with someone today, and vice versa. There are a few minor differences, of course, but overall it would be simple to parse the meaning of a sentence.
Let’s look at a written passage from 1820, specifically the description of Ichabod Crane in Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow:
He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head was small, and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that it looked like a weather-cock perched upon his spindle neck to tell which way the wind blew.
While the vocabulary used by Irving sounds rather formal, the meaning of the overall passage should be clear to anyone with a basic understanding of the English language. Things may get a little murky in regard to 1820s slang, though. Just like any other time period, the decade had its unique phrases, such as “a boodle of people” (“a crowd”) and “making a Virginia fence” (“drunkenly stumbling about”). You may have a hard time deciphering these turns of phrase, much as someone back then would be confused by “sus” or “rizz.”
Bennett Kleinman is a New York City-based staff writer for Optimism. He is also a freelance comedy writer, devoted New York Yankees and New Jersey Devils fan, and thinks plain seltzer is the best drink ever invented.
People have long debated which came first: the chicken or the egg? But in the world of language, there’s a similar debate raging on: Did orange the fruit or orange the color come first?
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The simple answer is that people have been enjoying the fruit since long before it was ever called an “orange,” but it was indeed the fruit name that ended up inspiring the color name. The etymology can be traced back to a first-century CE Indian medical text, which makes reference to a naranga tree. This Sanskrit word once meant “fruit like elephants” — possibly in reference to how the tough and dimpled skin of the fruit felt similar to that of the giant mammal. The word later showed up as orange in French and arancia in Italian around the 12th century, solely referring to the fruit.
As language developed, people used a variety of words to describe colors that didn’t have their own names. Geoluhred — “yellow-red” in Old English — was the 14th-century word for what we know today as “orange.” In the 1390s, Chaucer described the color of a fox in a Nun’s Priest’s Tale as “betwixe yellow and reed.” Later, in the 16th century, people started using the word “orange,” and in 1605, Shakespeare described an “orange tawny beard” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Sir Isaac Newton left orange and indigo out of the first color wheel, but added them in the 1660s to reach seven colors to mirror an octave, as he saw colors and music intrinsically connected. This endorsement proved to be the orange-flavored icing on the cake, as the color orange lives on in ROY G BIV.
Bennett Kleinman is a New York City-based staff writer for Optimism. He is also a freelance comedy writer, devoted New York Yankees and New Jersey Devils fan, and thinks plain seltzer is the best drink ever invented.
Grandparents hold a unique place in our families and are fondly referred to with a wide variety of special nicknames. Few other family titles have so many variations in English — “Granny,” “Gramps,” “Mimi,” “PopPop,” “MawMaw,” and “PawPaw” are just a few of the terms families might use to distinguish between sets of grandparents. (With today’s blended families and chosen families, folks might be lucky enough to have many people in the role of a grandparent.) The choices of names for these cherished people often reflect a family’s ancestral ties. The most popular nicknames for grandparents in the U.S. are “Nana” and “Papa,” but if your family isn’t using a standard American English title, you’re likely using a name from a different language.
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With Spanish as the second-most-spoken language in the U.S., the Spanish translations of “grandmother” and “grandfather” also are popular: abuela and abuelo and abuelita and abuelito (equivalent to “grandma” and “grandpa”).
The French terms grand-mère and grand-père require no translation, but other languages aren’t so obvious. Some cultures have different words for maternal and paternal grandparents. In Swedish, the maternal grandma and grandpa are called mormor and morfar, respectively, while the paternal grandparents are called farmor and farfar. Hindi follows a similar structure: Nani is the maternal grandma and nana is the maternal grandpa, while dadi and dada are the paternal grandparents. It might sound a bit strange to native English speakers, but dadi means “grandma.”
This term might sound more familiar to English speakers: “Babushka” is an English word for a headscarf, but it was borrowed for its association with older women, because it’s the Russian word for “grandmother.” The similar-sounding dedushka means “grandfather,” and the informal versions of these Russian names are baba and dedu. Another word pair frequently used in American English is yia yia and pappoús, Greek for “grandma” and “grandpa.” In Japanese, the words for “grandmother” and “grandfather” are sobo and sofu, but within families, the informal terms of obaachan (“grandmother”) and ojiichan (“grandfather”) are more commonly used. In Filipino, lola and lolo are “grandmother” and “grandfather,” and in Swahili, Africa’s most widely spoken language, the titles are bibi and babu (these terms are also used as a generic, but respectful form of address to an elderly woman or man).
The affection attached to all of these terms from around the world is universal. If you’re pondering what to call yourself when a new grandchild enters the family, “Grandpa” and “Grandma” are always classic, but you might want to look abroad for some inspiration.
Rachel is a Washington, D.C.-based freelance writer. When she's not writing, you can find her wandering through a museum, exploring a new city, or advocating the importance of the Oxford comma.
What Are the Most Popular Last Names Around the World?
While names like Skywalker and Targaryen may reign supreme in fiction, the most prevalent surnames globally are far more grounded, with millions sharing common last names like Smith, Wang, and Nguyen.
As common as fanciful names are in the land of fiction, Skywalker, Targaryen, and McFly aren’t too prevalent in the real world. Instead, you’re more likely to encounter someone named Smith, Wang, or any of the other eminently popular surnames that are shared by millions of people around the globe.
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The practice of classifying families by surname started in China in 2852 BCE, for organizational reasons. Today, surnames tend to fall into five categories: patronymics (names referring to fathers or ancestors), personal characteristics, occupations, toponymics (home region), and clans and tribes. Census data shows that surnames generally vary by region: Occupational surnames are more of a European or Western tradition, patronymics dominate much of Asia and Latin America, and names related to personal characteristics are common in much of Africa. There are, of course, exceptions to the rule; enslaved people often had to take the surnames of their subjugators, which is why many Black families in the U.S. have European surnames.
In English-speaking countries, the most popular surname is Smith, with around 2.5 million people named Smith in America alone. This name developed to designate an occupation, such as a blacksmith or silversmith.
In China, more than 92 million people go by the surname Wang, making it the most common last name in the world. The name is believed to have exploded in popularity around 250 BCE, when many royal families changed their name to Wang — meaning “king” in Mandarin — after the Zhou dynasty fell to the first Qin dynasty emperor. Li, Zhang, and Chen are other Chinese surnames shared by tens of millions of people.
In India, Devi, from the Sanskrit word for the Hindu mother goddess, is particularly common. Even when it’s not an official surname, Devi is sometimes used after the first name of a Hindu woman as a sign of respect. In Vietnam, about 40% of the population shares the last name Nguyen, and in South Korea, around 20% of the population goes by the surname Kim.
Many of these names are hundreds or thousands of years old, but new names are being created all the time. It’s become more of a common practice in Western countries to hyphenate or combine surnames when people get married, which has created brand-new names that bridge cultures and name origins.
Bennett Kleinman is a New York City-based staff writer for Optimism. He is also a freelance comedy writer, devoted New York Yankees and New Jersey Devils fan, and thinks plain seltzer is the best drink ever invented.
There are some phrases we’ve likely said a million times without thinking about how they’re written. Is it “bear with me” or “bare with me”? “Bows of holly” or “boughs of holly”? “Hear, hear!” or “here, here!”? (The answers, in order, are “bear,” “boughs,” and “here,” but we’ll review these and more in another edition.) Today, let’s talk about one confusing phrase in particular: Is it “that doesn’t phase me” or “that doesn’t faze me”?
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“Phase” and “faze” sound identical, but, like all homophones, they have distinct meanings and uses. “Phase” is a noun that means “a distinct period or stage in a series of events or a process of change or development” — think of the phases of the moon. It can also be used as a verb, as in “phase out,” but that’s a newer 20th-century term, related to eliminating something in phases. “Faze” is a verb that means “to disturb or disconcert (someone).” The early 19th-century word is a variant of the Old English feeze, which meant “to frighten” or “to alarm.”
When determining which homophone to use, it’s important to look at the intent of the overall phrase and the part of speech needed. If you say that something “doesn’t phase/faze you,” you’re looking for a verb that implies it has no effect on your actions or emotions. Given that intended meaning, it’s as clear as a full moon that “faze” is the proper word to use in this context.
Bennett Kleinman is a New York City-based staff writer for Optimism. He is also a freelance comedy writer, devoted New York Yankees and New Jersey Devils fan, and thinks plain seltzer is the best drink ever invented.
Colons (:) and semicolons (;) may look similar, and even live on the same key on your keyboard, but how they are used can be quite different. Both can help clarify information, and both represent a pause in the sentence; however, different punctuation needs call for each of them at different times. If we could narrow it down to a single key difference: A colon introduces information; a semicolon separates information.
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You can use a colon in the following ways:
When starting a list (as we did here).
When distinguishing a word or clause from the rest of the sentence: like this.
When titling a book or movie, as in Jaws 4: The Revenge.
When introducing a quote, such as when Mark Twain said: “The unspoken word is capital.”
The colon is also used for nongrammatical purposes in several contexts: times (8:15 p.m.), ratios (1:3), bibliographies (Publisher’s City: Publisher), and Bible verses (1 Corinthians 13:4), to name a few.
The semicolon is primarily used to join two connected complete sentences. It replaces a conjunction (such as “but” or “and”) and is most appropriate when the thoughts in the sentences are connected. For example, “I had a late breakfast today; I probably won’t eat lunch.” The semicolon is not needed if there are not two complete sentences. “I had a late breakfast today; about 10 a.m.” is incorrect, and the semicolon should be a comma instead.
A less common use of the semicolon is when there’s a complicated list that has commas within the items. Using a semicolon between the items in such a series helps to clear things up. For example: “I visited Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Knoxville, Tennessee; and Lawrence, Kansas. I brought Dan, an architect; Susan, a teacher; and Frank, a nuclear physicist.
A final note: If the words after the colon are a complete sentence (like this) make sure to start with a capital letter. You don’t need a capital letter after a semicolon unless it’s a proper noun.
Featured image credit: Alluvion Stock/ Shutterstock
Jennifer A. Freeman is the Senior Editor of Word Smarts and Word Daily. When she's not searching for a perfect synonym or reaching "Genius" level on Spelling Bee, she's playing with her Welsh Terrier in Greenville, SC.
Learning the alphabet is as easy as ABC … or AБB, ABΓ, and ႠႡႢ, depending on your language (those examples being from Cyrillic, Greek, and Georgian). English, Spanish, French, and many other languages use the 26-letter Latin alphabet that you likely learned in preschool, along with a handy song. But there are eight standard alphabet groups worldwide: Arabic, Aramaic, Armenian, Brahmi, Cyrillic, Georgian, Greek, and Latin.
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Most Western languages (English, the Romance languages, Germanic languages) use the Latin alphabet, with one notable exception. The Greek language is considered a Western language, but it’s an outlier in that it has its own alphabet. This ancient alphabet, developed around 1000 BCE, is the ancestor of all modern European languages. The word “alphabet” itself comes from the first and second letters of the Greek lettering system: “alpha” and “beta.” There are 24 letters in the Greek system, and while many of them look similar to Latin letters (Alpha is “A,” Epsilon is “E,” Kappa is “K,” Chi is “X,” for example), they have different names. We see evidence of the Greek alphabet adorning fraternities and sororities all over the United States, but we often use the Latin alphabet to write the words (Phi Beta Sigma is ΦΒΣ in the Greek, for example).
Arabic is an alphabet composed of 18 shapes and 28 phonetic sounds. This alphabet is used by Arabic speakers and those who speak Farsi, Dari, Tajik, Pashto, Kurdish, Urdu, and other Middle Eastern languages and dialects. Aramaic is an ancient language spoken on a smaller scale in the Middle East, and the alphabet consists of 22 letters that indicate consonants (but some can stand in for vowels). It’s used mainly in a liturgical sense by religious communities in Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria. Aramaic has close ties to Brahmi, an ancient script used throughout Asia and the Indian subcontinent. The Brahmi script is used by many language families, including Mongolic, Tai, and Dravidian. Sanskrit and Hindi developed out of the Brahmi script.
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The Armenian alphabet and the Georgian alphabet are widely used throughout the Caucasus region. The Armenian script, with 31 consonants and seven vowels, developed in the fifth century. The unique Georgian alphabet, meanwhile, is used only to write the Georgian language. This alphabet, comprised of 33 letters without any distinction between upper or lower case, has three variations still in use: mrgvlovani, nuskhuri, and mkhedruli. The Cyrillic script, consisting of 20 consonants, 10 vowels, a semivowel, and two modifier letters, was developed in the ninth or 10th century. It forms the basis for more than 50 languages, including Russian, Kazakh, and Serbian.
Some languages — Mandarin and Japanese, for example — don’t use a traditional alphabet, but use logosyllabic icons to represent different sounds. Written characters in Chinese languages are called hanzi, whereas Japanese has three different sets of phonetic symbols: hiragana, katakana, and kanji.
Appreciating that world language systems are vast, with incredibly rich histories, goes a long way toward understanding the melting pot that is the English language.
Bennett Kleinman is a New York City-based staff writer for Optimism. He is also a freelance comedy writer, devoted New York Yankees and New Jersey Devils fan, and thinks plain seltzer is the best drink ever invented.
You may know Mercury, Venus, and Mars, but did you know those monikers can change depending on the language? Learn more about the linguistic diversity behind the celestial bodies.
There are eight planets in our solar system — nine if you’re still clinging to those nostalgic memories of Pluto. For millennia, these planets were unnamed orbs floating around space. But once they were spotted by humans, the celestial bodies needed names. Depending on which language you speak, those names may slightly differ.
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In most Western languages, planet names derive from Roman and Greek gods, with Earth being the only exception. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune are based on Roman mythological figures, while Uranus is named after the Greek god of the heavens. Earth’s name comes from Old English and Germanic words for “ground” and “soil.”
All major Romance languages follow a similar naming mechanism. French uses Mercure, Vénus, Terre, Mars, Jupiter, Saturne, Uranus, and Neptune, while Portuguese uses Mercúrio, Vênus, Terra, Marte, Júpiter, Saturno, Urano, and Netuno. Major Germanic languages (German, Afrikaans, Swedish, and Dutch) also use similar variations. In Dutch, for example, the planets are named Mercurius, Venus, Aarde, Mars, Jupiter, Saturnus, Uranus, and Neptunus.
While North American Indigenous languages are geographically placed in the Western world, they’re not derived from the same sources. In Navajo, the word Nahasdzáán — meaning “our woman” — is used for Earth. The other planets in order are: Mókiwii (Mercury), Biinis (Venus), Máaz (Mars), Jíbitoo (Jupiter), Séetin (Saturn), Yoowéinis (Uranus), and Néʼtoon (Neptune). You might notice phonetic relations to the Western language terminology, but there’s no deliberate tie to the Greek and Roman gods.
In the Eastern Hemisphere, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean use names for the planets based on natural elements, other deities, or characteristics of the celestial bodies. (You’ll notice the symbols used to represent the words in Chinese and Japanese are the same.) To give a few examples:
Mercury: Water Star — Chinese: 水星 (Shuǐxīng); Japanese: 水星 (Suisei); Korean: 수성 (Suseong)
Earth: Ball of land — Chinese: 地球 (Dìqiú); Japanese: 地球 (Chikyū); Korean: / 지구 (Jigu)
Neptune: King of the Sea Star — Chinese: 海王星 (Hǎiwángxīng); Japanese: 海王星 (Kaiousei); Korean: 해왕성 (Haewangseong)
The naming conventions for celestial bodies across world languages demonstrates the shared connections between tongues. Whether the inspiration was drawn from the gods or the elements, the majesty of the planets generated names full of reverence.
Bennett Kleinman is a New York City-based staff writer for Optimism. He is also a freelance comedy writer, devoted New York Yankees and New Jersey Devils fan, and thinks plain seltzer is the best drink ever invented.
Have you ever wondered why “pound” is abbreviated as “lb”? The surprising origins of this and other common weight abbreviations trace back to ancient Rome.
The late great comedian Norm Macdonald commented: “ID… there’s a strange abbreviation when you think about it. ‘I’ is short for ‘I,’ and then ‘D’ is short for dentification.'”
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Macdonald wasn’t quite right with his assessment, but he was correct in that some abbreviations can be more confusing than they are helpful. If you can’t decipher what an abbreviation stands for, should the word or phrase be shortened at all? Even everyday terms may boggle the mind: For example, why is “pound” abbreviated as “lb”? Maybe you memorized the term in school, or maybe one day you asked the deli manager what that “LB” on the sticker meant, but it’s not an easy one to decipher on its own, because the word and its abbreviation don’t share a single letter. There is an answer as to why it’s shortened that way, though, and it dates back to ancient Rome.
The Romans used a basic unit of weight called a libra (~0.722 pounds), derived from the Latin for “scale” or “balance.” Libra pondo is a Latin phrase that translates to “a pound by weight.” When these terms reached Britain, they became the standard for weighing gold and silver. The abbreviation “lb” is a shortening of libra that was carried over to the English word “pound.” The British currency is also called the pound, and the £ symbol represents libra.
Another concept worth mentioning is the Roman uncia, a Latin word that translates to “one-twelfth.” It was used by the Romans as a unit of measurement for one-twelfth of a libra, and it became the inspiration for the English word “ounce.” So, where did that “z” in the abbreviation “oz” come from? On the journey from Latin to English, there was a detour with the Italian word onza.
Featured image credit: bonniev.photos/ Shutterstock
Bennett Kleinman is a New York City-based staff writer for Optimism. He is also a freelance comedy writer, devoted New York Yankees and New Jersey Devils fan, and thinks plain seltzer is the best drink ever invented.
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