Words • Words • Words
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Someone might say, “I walked slow,” which always set her off. Edith would immediately counter with “Slow-LY, adverb, modifies the verb to walk.” She would say it firmly in the same way she would step on a snail. (Chicken farmer's daughter, with little concern for niceties.) More than just the messenger of truth, she was the language sheriff, and she gave short shrift to those in ignorance of sacrosanct rules. It was her duty to make people understand that life was stern, language was nothing to trifle with, and we're not put on this earth for pleasure alone.
Because she’d been saying it two or three times a week for umpty-ump years, it eventually became an afterthought. Everybody within her orbit knew it by heart, including her students. But I got the full locomotive brunt of it. She was all warmed up by the time I came along, and by golly, it stuck. It’s in my head and it isn’t going away. Even today it strangles up my mind when I hear people butcher English that way, but that isn’t my worst peeve.
The one word that truly and immediately lights my fuse is the non-word anyways. Drives me nuts. The word has no plural form. There, I’ve said it. I’ve gotten it out and down on paper—well, pixels anyway. If you’re reading this and you’ve been responsible for the heinous crime of putting that odious “s” at the end of it, please just stop. That is as wrong to my ear as pronouncing the “t” in often.
And yes, I realize the language is always in flux and that when someone “ax” you to do something, they are actually just using the Middle English form of the word “ask” which has come down through the ages in parallel with the more accepted version, but still: off-ten is just wrong.Edith and Ray, my older siblings Glen and Sheri (plus myself bringing up the rear), had this thing with language—we intentionally mispronounced (and sometimes downright mangled) our words and sentences. Part of this might have come from so many kids living in our house since Edith and Ray provided board and room to a number of kids over the years. Some hailed from other countries, and I don’t think any of them had been under the direct supervision of a fourth-grade schoolteacher before. Didier and Nicki and Phillip were from France, Carol and Leti were Asian. There was a variety of education and language, so there were a variety of accents and abilities. Such little missteps are often cute and get repeated or exaggerated. I’m guessing that’s where it started. Either that or someone was mocking Edith since she was a rather strict school teacher with a ton of attitude about language.
I only figured out what was going on over time, because no one ever said that’s what we were doing. When the word “pneumonia” was used in a sentence, which wasn’t very often because I don’t remember anyone ever getting the actual disease, the letter “p” at the beginning of the word was always pronounced rather than left silent. Thus, “new-moan-ya” was pronounced “peh—new-moan-ya”—with a perfectly straight face. To the inexperienced youngsters growing up in our family, it was probably assumed that was how the word was supposed to be pronounced.
The story goes that my older brother Glen came home from school one day, furious at our parents for allowing him to think pneumonia was pronounced the way our family said it. It turned out that he’d made a colossal fool of himself. First by using our patented pronunciation, and then by defending his mistake to the entire classroom. He’d stood his ground because he knew he came from an educated family (our parents did not celebrate ignorance). Edith said it was quite astonishing and wonderful to see her own child’s righteous indignation as he stood before her that day. Hands on his hips, glaring up at her, he told her in no uncertain terms what thoroughly rotten parents she and Ray were to have allowed him out into the world with that kind of false education embedded in his vocabulary.
Our family sometimes substituted nonsense verses to church music such as Bringing in the Sheaves or Rock of Ages. So, if my father were taking out the trash, for instance, he’d be singing:
Taking out the trash,
Taking out the trash;
We will come rejoicing,
Taking out the trash.
Same thing with anything else we might be doing at any given moment as long as we ended up with the same number of syllables. Interestingly enough, a lot of people don’t hear this song correctly, even when it’s sung with the proper verses, and I have often heard “Bringing in the sheep.” instead of “Bringing in the sheaves.” My wife does this intentionally and thinks it’s hilarious—but goes the extra mile by using the non-word “sheeps” to give it even more topspin. Partly because it sounds like it should work, don’t you think? The Bible talks about shepherds all the time. It’s only when you listen to the rest of the song (which nobody does unless they go to church a lot), that you realize that it’s all about planting seeds (of kindness) and harvesting such a crop in sheaves of grain. We still sing it actually, and just as inaccurately.
All of this is accomplished to the framework such music provided of course. It was sometimes popular to go up into a long high yodel on “rejoicing” to give the whole thing that extra lift. I have felt a little silly singing my own verses to Frank Sinatra standards of course, but assign that to joie de vivre. A little boola, boola sung to Yellow Submarine never hurt anyone, and I think it describes the human condition, despite the casual disrespect. I mean, nobody would think Beatles music is great literature, nor the Yale Fight Song for that matter.
I remember snippets of conversation—phrases really: “Tosn’t mean t’aint so!, Much more betterer..., More gooder, and Gots to have D. The letter D was for Discipline, something Glen mocked our mother with all one summer when she was trying to lose weight. Edith had been muttering the word discipline in an aspirational way for months to remind herself of that which she had decided was necessary to succeed in her noble endeavor. Glen also used a felt-tipped pen to write the letter “D” in crazy places for her to find over the years to come. He did this in much the same way he used to hide Easter eggs for me to find when I was little—hidden inside tight little places or perched out of my sight-line, close to the ceiling where I’d have to use a ladder to make sure it was there. (Over the years it was common enough to find the remains of some forgotten and disintegrated Easter egg, suddenly discovered in an inconvenient corner of our home—which brought back memories of happy days gone by.)
There were other bon mots floating around in our family’s repertoire as well. “Jonny-be-bonny, tea-allego-money, tea-legged, tie-legged, bow-legged Jonny,” was chanted in response to my acting a little too smart for my britches. Where it came from I have no idea, but it was intended to take me down a peg or two. I kept climbing whatever pegs were put before me, to the point where I sometimes got nosebleeds, and my mother in particular was in the habit of correcting my overreach.
Or we would say thanks in a mocking sort of way for some small deed, like passing the salt at table: “Thank you so much. My mother thanks you; my father thanks you; all my sisters and brothers thank you. And I thanks you.” Which was paraphrased from the movie Yankee Doodle Dandy, but had the added benefit of bad grammar at the end, which gave that extra bit of topspin to it.
Anyways, (ha ha) our family used obviously incorrect grammar in a nonchalant, somewhat quirky manner. This was probably due at least in part to Edith. Winston tastes good like a cigarette should—as instead of like. Winston tastes good as a cigarette should. As is used as a conjunction, joining two clauses, and like is actually a preposition, which would always be used to describe a noun or noun clause. Our family frowned on cigarettes as tools of the very devil and evidence of utter stupidity, but whenever that Winston ad came on with its stupid jingle, Edith would correct the television immediately. That ad ran for years and was no doubt where I picked up my habit of talking back to the television set.
In later years (after Steve Jobs came back to save his company), Apple published a series of commercials using photos of his personal heroes, such as Einstein and Dylan, advising the public to “Think different.” The fact that Apple didn’t say “Think differently” was quite noticeable and horribly grating; Adverb, modifies the verb to think went off in my head like a bomb every time I heard or saw Apple’s flagrant language corruption, and I was suddenly talking back to magazine ads in addition to television.
I put some thought into why they did it—so irritating!—and came up with what felt like a correct answer. Simply put, Jobs wanted to grab my attention. That’s what advertising’s all about. And Apple’s customer base at that time was largely comprised of well-educated, discerning people who were willing to pay extra for the quality, dependability, and design elegance that Apple offered.
Given that Jobs was a famous minimalist (hardly any furniture in his house, no television set, etc.), he wanted to use the least amount of effort and verbiage to accomplish his goal. Well, he got my attention; I absolutely noticed the ads: poor grammar by the world’s largest and arguably most self-aware corporation? Approved by Jobs? Perhaps this was his way of doing what our family had been doing all along; mocking elitist attitudes while espousing them at the same time. Cute.
All of this badinage had the effect of sensitizing me to words, and I wondered about them. Words that sounded alike (homonyms) and words with a common origin (cognates) caught my attention. It was a mystery in plain sight that nobody ever talked about, and yet a ton of words like that are scattered throughout our vocabulary.
I was pretty sure that the word red (meaning the color) had nothing to do with having read a book, and I had somehow figured out that nickels were probably made of nickel, but other words were less obvious. We wear hosiery and tube socks, so was such clothing-related somehow to a garden hose, which is also a tube? As it turned out, yes! Old English hosa, of Germanic origin, is related to Dutch hoos “stocking, or water hose” and German Hosen, meaning “trousers.” But alas, the internet had yet to be born, so I couldn’t just look this stuff up on my iPhone or computer, I had to read about it. Which I did out of curiosity. I was pretty sure I wasn’t learning anything useful, and I didn’t remember most of it, but it was satisfying to connect the dots.
Language changes over time. If it didn’t we’d all be speaking some sort of Indo-European Sanskrit-Greek or putting words together like the Germans do, piling them into one another until they become grammatical freight train disasters. There are compound words in many languages, but German (one of the early source languages of English) tends to construct words by smooshing smaller words together such that the result stretches halfway across a page. As Mark Twain put it, “Some German words are so long that they have perspective.” So thank goodness for the creation of new words and the repurposing of older ones.
Mary Berry of The Great British Baking Show on PBS uses the word scrummy to describe any made dish which is (I’m guessing) both yummy and scrumptiously delicious. The British are famous for making up words and truncating half their vocab. They practically invented the practice, and they’re very good at it. This takes me off-topic for a moment, but it all boils down to a choice: to be either a hidebound reactionary, pounding the table over the illiterati taking over the world (grrrr!), or quiet acceptance of non-words such as anyways. In any case, language has always been somewhere near the foundation of my life here on earth and provided my initial launch direction.
I was waiting in a department store one day, long before smartphones that we now use to entertain ourselves during such moments when our partner is trying to find something that doesn’t make her look horrible (and yet actually fits), and I noticed some older hardback books that were part of a display. Books in the women’s clothing department? Artistic!
I stood on a chair (the one time it actually helped) and took down one of the books with the intention of reading it to pass the time and was quite surprised to find that it had never been read. Ever. I knew this because the pages had never been cut. That is, the pages were still folded at the right-hand edge from their original signature format. So I could only actually read pages 1, 4, 5, 8, and so on without taking out a penknife and slicing the pages apart; the in-between pages were hidden inside the fold. Hardbound books are printed on large parent-size sheets of paper called signatures, which get folded down to page size after printing, sewn into the binding, then trimmed (or torn) on the right-hand side. I worked often enough with eight- and sixteen-page signature counts (depending on the size of the press) when sending books off for printing and bookbinding, so I was familiar with the process. I’d just never seen it uncompleted before.
This book had been printed at some point in the early 1900s, and I noticed something else as I leafed through it. Suitcase was spelled with a hyphen, as suit-case, as were the word to-day and good-bye.
That words and language change over time is something I’d noticed at an early age because it was part of my life, what with all the Elizabethan English I’d had preached at me in church. But it never struck me until that moment in the department store that it might be changing from book to book or even from year to year. That seemed odd somehow. Of course, I’d noticed older people complaining about slang as I was growing up. Ain’t is not a proper word, young man, so don’t use it unless you want to sound like an illiterate fool.
In recent years I’ve noticed the word “literally” used as if it meant “figuratively,” which is actually its antonym. So “literally” now also means something that is not literal, but rather an exaggeration; a kind of wishful thinking version of the truth. Where have we heard that before? So when someone says, “It’s literally a thousand years old,” they actually mean it’s just old, but they aren’t sure how old it really is and they just picked some really big number out of the air and put the word literally in front of it to show that it’s not literally a thousand years old—by saying that it literally is a thousand years old. Whew! What used to be an interminably convoluted joke is now how people actually language themselves, and without any irony whatsoever! Language doesn’t follow any of our wants or wishes, of course, it follows the herd (so to speak).
Etymology—the origin of words and how they’ve changed over time has always interested me, and I’ve spent a fair amount of effort looking up words and phrases to see where they came from and why. This is partly due to being an avid reader and having to look up words I didn’t understand in a dictionary as I went along. Part of it was my family’s verbal behavior: we made up words occasionally, mispronounced some words intentionally, and mocked the poor grammar we heard on television all the time. And there were my mother’s short sayings and odd words, which she called Okie-isms (she being from Oklahoma). All of which simply added a little color to our lives. Since both of my parents were readers and fairly articulate, such words were always used ironically and with a straight face. This was considered funny.
I was growing up while all this was going on, and I was always looking for something interesting to read. One book that caught my attention was Charles Funk’s Thereby Hangs a Tale: Stories of Curious Word Origins. I read it like someone else might read a novel. It was fascinating, and I wanted to know more. As the years rolled along and I began to frequent new and used bookstores and libraries, similar volumes came to my attention. A Browser’s Dictionary: A Compendium of Curious Expressions and Intriguing Facts, by John Ciardi, and The Mother Tongue: English and how it got that way, by Bill Bryson became part of a growing shelf of interesting books dealing with language. I would pick these up and read them from time to time, just as I would snack on a tray of nuts on a side table. Nothing serious, mind you, just good clean fun. But I was also reading books with words I’ve never run into. I’m still looking them up, still trying them out to get the meaning right, and wondering where they came from to hit me between the eyes the way they did.
I’ve enjoyed P.G. Wodehouse since I was in the fourth grade and stumbled upon his novels while picking out books to take on vacation. Wodehouse contributed generously to my interest in language since his books contain a wide and interesting vocabulary—including a lot of uniquely British phrases, a fair amount of Latin, quite a bit of French, and a ton of Biblical and Shakespearian references. I had to keep looking up all this stuff as I went along or I’d have been skipping over them, trying to pick up meaning from context, which didn’t always work. I have a habit of reading favorite books many times over, and remaining ignorant gets old, so having an open dictionary to hand became my path to better understanding.
Beat poets, like Ginsberg, didn’t use unusual words, but they used language in unfamiliar ways, hitting me with parsed phrasing that forced me to consider our world in new ways. Sometimes nuanced, but often like sledgehammers, the depth of their thoughts and economy of words was phenomenal. I found a window into other lives and other ways of viewing the world that I never knew existed.
I stumbled onto disparate items of interest in my readings, some of which began to add up into a kind of patchwork of knowledge and understanding. It helped that I took German in high school early on and discovered many words that were almost identical to their English equivalents. Father, brother, sister, butter, mother, and house translate as Vater, Bruder, Schwester, Butter, Mutter, und Haus—and that was just a sampling. This could not be by accident, I thought. I eventually learned that Old English is a Germanic variant. Why my German teacher never mentioned this is a mystery. Even such a tiny bit of information can be incredibly important to anyone trying to learn a new language. Parallels could and should have been drawn.
It helped when I learned that England and France had at various times been virtually one country, with the French language spilling across the channel during the Norman Conquest, and English packing its bags for France when a large part of France was legally English soil and ruled by an English king. More than a third of the modern English vocabulary is of French origin; there are some forty thousand English words that come directly from French. And let’s not forget the Vikings, who invaded England’s coastal villages so many times that our language became liberally seasoned with Old Norse. Trust me, though it may seem odd at first, we are still very likely to use the same words the Vikings did in our everyday speech. You might have eggs for breakfast, watch football, wear a skirt, have freckles on the skin of your leg or foot, feel happy or angry, like to sprint or run a race.
But we have gotten our vocabulary from everywhere. Borrowed words such as anonymous (Greek), loot (Hindi), Safari (Arabic), cartoon (Italian), cookie (Dutch) fill our language with color, and most people would never consider them to be “foreign” at all. We’ve used them so often that their foreign sound has disappeared with familiarity.
Little reminders of how the different languages of the world are connected like the colored threads in a tapestry can be found closer to hand nowadays because of manufactured goods being packaged for international use. I first noticed the word tambor on the packaging of a Xerox copy machine drum back when such items cost $800 and were an industrial supply item for those who had the technical training to install them. The package had its contents listed in various languages, including Spanish. And then it hit me; tambourine is a miniature drum, isn’t it? Id est, tambor equalled drum! It made sense and at the same time brought the world of foreign languages a little closer to where I lived.
I also learned that a large percentage of our language came from Greek (filtered mostly through Latin and French), which gave us words like music and lyrics, museum, and muse. These words are so similar that there just had to be a connection. Well, ancient Greeks loved music, which was inspired by a muse. Makes sense, wouldn’t you say? And if you sang words while playing the lyre, the words you sang were lyrics.
The Greeks had a building they called a mouseion, which meant “seat of the muses,” a philosophical institution where learning took place. So ancient museums were an early form of university—a place where the muses might be at work.
I began to understand the connections between the words I was reading, and I was fascinated by all of it—the history, the borrowing of words from one language to another, and how our language acquired so many synonyms. Why do we spell a word, but cast a spell? Were wise persons originally considered to be wizards? More than anything, I came to terms with the fact that my education was quite inadequate. An inspired English teacher or two would have been fantastic, but I didn’t get that until college. So I did the best I could with books, records, and music.
I have three regrets as far as my self-styled education was concerned. I didn’t get help in advanced math early on when I could have used it, I never purchased my own copy of the OED (the Oxford English Dictionary), and I never took Latin. Latin wasn’t really an option, since it was never offered in the schools where I was growing up. But even a basic first-year course would have been invaluable. Access to the OED would have been wonderful. The doorstop dictionary I had was good enough as a dictionary, but the OED is comprised of twenty volumes and constitutes a time machine. It has the derivation and origin of words, sometimes going on for page after page of fine print. The longest entry in the OED is for the verb “set,” which has 154 main meanings, and which entry alone includes 60,000 words and 362,000 characters of explanation. The OED is not so much a dictionary as it is an encyclopedia slash history book for words, but even our public library didn’t have a copy.
It always intrigued me that the English speak their language differently than they write it. The English play with words like kittens with a ball of string, morphing them from “correct and approved” forms into variations of slang which have no parallel except perhaps in Black American English, which uses an overlay of southern dialect, gangster slang, and church generated inflections to create a complex patois. Jamaican Creole is similar, incorporating African dialects to the same effect.
But the English are the champions, perhaps because they’re been invaded so many times and have become so used to making up new words that they think little of it, and enjoy the process almost like a sport or game that keeps evolving.
One of the things that intrigued me was the æsc or ash character I kept running into, a ligature (two letters smooshed together into one) printed as æ. Ligature is a Middle English word that came over from Latin and means “bound together.” When your doctor stitches that gash in your arm, she inserts ligatures to tie your flesh together. The ash character shows up in words such as Æsop, mediæval, antennæ, larvæ, and nebulæ. I didn’t run across it that often, but it was a clue to an underlying mystery buried within our language, and I was curious. Not to hold you in suspense, the ash character is a living remnant from Old English, largely expunged from the language by the 1300s. It originally meant the ash tree in addition to the ae ligature and was just one of five such characters, including thorn, wynn, eth, and yogh. It still exists by accident in a few words that somehow eluded the scribes’ pogrom to eradicate it. Going back even further, the ash character came from the runic alphabet the Germanic tribes used. That’s right, runes, as in Lord of the Rings. I love this stuff!
I purchased a heavy wooden music stand at the San Jose Flea Market long ago and kept it wherever I lived, with a very large, always-open dictionary on it. Every time I was curious about a word, I’d look it up. I never did learn to spell very well, but instead of just skipping over words I didn’t know, I kept going to this dictionary. Over the years that activity began to add up. Partly because I would see interesting words adjacent to the one which had originally perplexed me, and I would continue reading. Sometimes I read right down the page and over to the next and down that page...
I didn’t formally start reading up on the origins of English until several years later. My curiosity was wide-ranging, and I didn’t settle on any one subject. I was reading so much—a book every couple of days at that time: theoretical physics, archeology, the history of the Soviet gulags, space travel, and other subjects. Books on language were not high on my list, but that eventually changed.
A few years ago I found the motherload: Kevin Stroud’s The History of English Podcast. I’d been listening to podcasts on my iPhone when walking our dog, Molly. It has become my favorite. It provides a wealth of information, told as a colorful narrative by a gifted storyteller.
Kevin Stroud traces the history of England and France, but also goes back to other cultures and influences, including Old Norse, as the English language adopted many basic words like “shirt” and “husband” from the Vikings. At the time this was being written, there were more than 130 episodes, each about an hour long. The English language has an interesting and quite colorful story, and it takes a while to explain all of it, particularly when one goes into the history of it all.
I love knowing, for instance, that the word ye, as in “Ye Olde English Tea Shoppe” has always been pronounced the same as the modern version of the word “the.” In the Middle Ages, scribes started using the “y” character instead of the thorn glyph.
The thorn character represented the “th” digraph (two letters that make a single sound). Time passed, and these same scribes kept transitioning written English, using the th character combination instead of the y or the earlier thorn, which is where we are today. This is why we now use th to make the th sound. No one teaches all that history except to etymology students, so nowadays we’ve come to pronounce “ye” phonetically, thinking that’s the way it has always been pronounced.
Another example: The word “girl” originally meant any young person—boy or girl—just as “deer” meant any four-legged forest animal, and I found many such references. I now know why there were legends of King Arthur (in French for the nobility) as well as Robin Hood (in English for the common folk), and under what circumstances the Magna Carta (the Large Charter) was written. Not useful information I suppose, but fun nevertheless.
Kevin Stroud gave me permission to reproduce one of his episodes in text form.
The following shows the richness of our language and why its history is so fascinating.
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The History of English Podcast
Episode 102
English speakers were not only bilingual, but they could often recognize the French version of an English word, and English speakers increasingly felt comfortable using the French word as a synonym. Usually, the French word had a slightly more elevated sense, so it gave English speakers a way to express themselves with nuance and subtlety. This was to have major repercussions for the English language. It means that English was acquiring two different ways of saying the same thing: one way in native English, and another way in French. There was a natural tendency to use French and English words interchangeably, but the French word normally had a slightly more elevated sense. Any differences in meaning allowed one to be used in common situations and the other in more formal situations.
If an English man or woman prepared a meal for family or friends, they could eat in English, or dine in French. They might eat in an English house or a French manor or castle. Or if the host was a peasant, they might eat in an English hut or French cottage. The host might make a meal to feed his guests in English, or prepare a meal to nourish them in French. The cook could ask for help in English, or the chef might request assistance in French. The guests might be served an English cow or French beef, an English sheep or French mutton, an English calf or French veal, an English pig or French pork. The meat might be cooked over English fire or French flames. The liquid in the pots might seethe in English or boil or stew in French. This might be part of an English broth or French soup. The cook might work up an English sweat or French perspiration. When the guests arrived the host might meet them with an English kiss or a French embrace. The host might give them a hearty welcome in English or a cordial reception in French. After a while, it might be time to start the meal in English or commence the meal in French. Guests would be called to the English bench or the French table. It would be located in an English room or a French chamber. The guests would go in in English, or enter in French. During the meal, the guests might tell stories described as funny in English or amusing in French. At the end of the meal, the guests would leave in English or depart in French.
So you get the idea. English gradually started to acquire two different ways to say the same thing. One way with native English words and another way with French words, that were considered slightly more sophisticated. Very often people would use both of these words together to reinforce the point and to make sure that the person they were speaking to understood what they were saying. During the early middle English period, as English documents reemerged, we see the use of these types of French and English pairs. Writers referred to the noble and worthy; noble being French and worthy being English.
During this period, scribes often wrote using these English and French word pairings, particularly when they wanted to make certain that the reader fully understood precise and specific meanings. This was especially critical in the legal profession, where it was essential to use the right word. The legal profession was becoming standardized throughout the 1200s. Old English legal codes had largely been replaced with legal codes written in Latin, but French was starting to be used beside Latin in the courts. Up to this point, the courts had been conducted in French. All of this posed a challenge to English lawyers. They had to deal with Anglo-Saxon legal concepts mixed with Latin and French terminology. So if you were a mediæval English lawyer, which word did you use—the traditional old English word or the French equivalent?
For the most part, the lawyers decided to play it safe and use both. They paired the English and French terms to avoid any ambiguities. This is what scribes had been doing for years, but it became essential in the legal writing of mediæval England, and it’s a standard feature of modern legalese to this day. The following list contains at least one word from Old English, paired with a French or Latin word. Sometimes all three.
law and order
lewd and lascivious
goods and chattel
sale and transfer
last will and testament
and and tenements
acknowledge and confess
true and correct
breaking and entering
make and enter into
cease and desist
give, devise, and bequeath
free and clear
right, title, and interest
As you can see, this very old technique of combining English and French words survives to this day, even though we no longer know why we’re doing it. It also helps explain why modern legalese can be so ponderous. But it’s not just legal documents. We’re combining old English and French words when we use phrases like:
wrack and ruin
love and affection
soft and gentle
kind and generous
bells and whistles
greetings and salutations
These phrases tap into both vocabularies to express the same or very similar idea. Of course today we would consider all of those words to be English, but this approach can be traced back to the early 1200s.
Pygmalion is a wonderful stage play by George Bernard Shaw that was also made into a great movie: My Fair Lady. It is focused primarily on language: pronunciation, grammar, and the differences between English accents demarcating class distinctions. It’s great fun, and the closest example I can point to that describes how most people take their own language for granted. Language is a tool for communication, but most of us don’t think about it all that much. No wonder the tool gets a bit rusty at times: nobody’s taking care of it.
Such are the small nibbles of history that paint a portrait of who we were, how we got to where we are today, and what one’s yellowest whangee might be when all is said and done.
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