Random Research Day: Bummer Etymology

My daughter is one of those crazy-overscheduled teenagers you hear about, and since she doesn’t have a driver’s license yet (too busy), I drive her places a lot. Mostly, we talk about words, or come up with word games, or talk about how we sure spend a lot of time talking about words. It’s pretty metalinguistic—occasionally meta-metalinguistic.

She was entranced one day by the words “imagine” and “magic”—it seemed logical to both of us that those ought to be related. But when we got home and looked it up, we found that:

• “Magic” comes, via French, Latin, and Greek, from magus, an ancient Zoroastrian philosopher (think “three Magi”).

• “Imagine,” on the other hand, comes via Latin from imago, or image.

• While we’re here, “magnificent,” “magnanimous,” “magnate,” etc. all come from Latin magnus, meaning “great.”

• And “maggot” comes from the Old Norse word mathkr, which means maggot.

So, if for some reason you say

“The magician imagined magnificent maggots,”

you have spanned four different source words from French, Latin, Greek, Persian, and Norse.

Impressive, but still disappointing.

They might not be etymologically related, but I still believe that imagination is magic.

An icky word for Halloween

Random Research led us this week into the realm of sleepy sand—that grainy stuff in your eyes when you wake up in the morning, whatever your family calls it. Its real name is

Gound (pronounced "gowned")

We also learned another of its nicknames: optiboogers. And we agreed that Optiboogers would be an excellent name for a rock band. Also Gingerbread Godzilla. And Giant Pez Dispenser. Stay tuned for gingerbread Godzilla, whom we all decided should make an appearance this Christmas.

Anyway, gound is composed of mucus, tears, and/or dust, and it forms because you're not blinking those things away when you're asleep.

What is your family's word for gound?

A complete (practice) disaster

Once or twice a year, our neighborhood has a mock disaster. No one specifies what has befallen us, though flood and earthquake are possibilities that come to mind. We all check in at a central location, where someone has a HAM radio, and we're encouraged to practice our family disaster procedures at home.

This year, our family decided to try out our 72-hour disaster kits. We each have a backpack full of personal supplies, plus a family duffel bag of food and misc. We grabbed those, threw some bottles of water in the back of the van, and randomly drove to a pond we've been wanting to visit a ways down the freeway. Then we piled our backpacks on a picnic table and attempted to cook and eat dinner.

Cooking, we managed. We had pieces from three different kinds of emergency stoves, plus a firepit at the campsite. Thanks to our time in Cub Scouts, we had a "buddy burner"* made out of paraffin, a tuna can, and cardboard. We'd realized we didn't have a pot in the kit before we left, so there was a big pan for warming up our can of beef stew.

There were not, however, any bowls for our stew, or cups for our water. And everyone was dismayed that we'd eaten up the granola bars in some past "emergency."

We ate from the communual pot, found a geocache, made friends with the feral cats in the dumpster, went out for burgers to supplement the emergency rations, and had a great time.

Still not ready to think about basements full of mud, traffic jams full of panicked people, and/or actually living on our provisions, though.

*Note discussion at this page about the possible dangers of plastic-lined tuna cans. I think ours was old enough to not have a lining.