Grammar Girl here.
I'm Mignon Fogarty, and today I am here with Doug Harper from the Online Etymology Dictionary, affectionately known as EtymOnline.
Doug has created this resource that is one of just a handful of things that I use almost every day.
I can't imagine doing my job without it.
So, Doug, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast.
Hey, thanks for having me.
I've been looking forward to this.
I am so excited to finally meet you.
You don't have to say I put out a call on social media for questions that people might have for you.
And the overwhelming response I got was just people saying, tell him, thank you.
I tell him, thank you for making this amazing resource.
So the world loves you.
I don't want to say that doesn't matter, because it matters a good deal to hear that from people from time to time.
Just don't let it go to my head.
No, tell creators you like their work.
Writers, yeah, it matters.
It's almost as good as money and better in the right ways.
That's right.
Well, you know we're going to talk about the site and your process a little later, but I thought to get started.
You've given me some words.
We can talk about their etymologies, which is always obviously interesting.
That sort of are entryways into bigger questions about etymology.
So the first one we have is grave.
The grave we bury people in is not the same as when you say, like, he has a grave problem.
And I thought that was so interesting.
It is, because it's subtle.
We could go in and look at the actual entries and I can show you how to use the site to answer the question are they probably related or probably not?
Oh, yeah.
You want to do that?
Yeah, for people who are watching on YouTube, this will be great.
Okay.
Shall I share my screen, or do you want to just open it and do it from your end?
Okay, yeah, go ahead and share your screen.
All right.
This is, if I do a search on Edamonline for grave, this is what comes up in the search results.
At the head of it is the noun, the one you were talking about, the thing you put the dead body in.
And below that one is the adjective.
And frankly, to answer the question, are they related?
You can skip 99% of this.
You're following the from train through all this, from this, from that.
Each of those is a step back in time.
One of them might be 10 years.
One of them might be 1,000.
That's a different question.
And what you're looking for is the last stop on the line.
And in this case, it's going to be this Proto-Indo-European, P-I-E, route to That meant to dig.
Sort of makes sense.
And you go down to the other one, skip everything else, looking for the end of the train again, and here it stops.
At this Proto-Indo-European route, that means heavy.
They're not the same route.
You could stop right there and say, not related, period.
Except for two things.
These have asterisks in front of them.
And in this case, it's actually explicit that it's a reconstructed root.
You've crossed an invisible line between history and reconstructed language there.
And that asterisk is a warning sign, among other things, to you.
Okay, we're now in guesswork.
Really highly educated and careful guesswork, but guesswork.
And the other one is, if you look further down in the burying grave one, or perhaps it's not even certain.
And I can tell you, I should indicate who I got this from.
I'm pretty sure I know where I got it from, that it could be a substratum word in Germanic.
Where do you think you got that from?
It's my old Frisian etymology book, which I identify as Boutkan, B-O-U-T-K-A-N.
It's in the sources.
They're all in the sources.
The first job with reconstructing Proto-Indo-European was to make everything fit together.
And now they're looking at it again and saying, okay, maybe we over-assumed connections here.
There might have been older languages that contributed words to this corpus and we've, in a rush to connect them all and make it Proto-Indo-European, overlooked that.
So I think there's a tendency in the discipline now to undermine old assumptions, which is one of the reasons I really don't like dealing with it on the site.
You've got what you need to know here.
With the sort of warning sign that wait a minute.
They're not certain about this, whether they're connected or not.
But you can say they're not thought to be related.
You're still left with the question of, well, how come?
How did they end up being the same word?
That's where I think a lot of language, linguistic sites don't go there.
My background is newspapers.
We always ask that question.
Why?
What color was it?
And why not?
That's in the grain here.
So I look at this, and I'm trying to figure it out.
The digging grave is Old English, and that's Germanic.
It's a very old word.
First thing I'm looking at is dates.
This one goes all the way back.
This is all the way back.
The other one, this is recent, the adjectives.
1540s, and the senses that we're getting it in come along not long after that 1580s, 1590s.
It's elizabethan well, tutor elizabethan.
That's the period when english is bulking up on latinate words.
It needs to get bigger than the ideas and the poetry need it to be bigger.
So english is is.
It's the kind of word you might see, even though it does come ultimately through French, but it reaches back more directly to Latin.
Why did it wait that long?
If you look around further down the list, there's also a verb, grave to dig, which we now have as engrave, but it used to be fully verb.
It also survives in this sort of biblical amber of graven images, that phrase.
But it's basically gone.
And not even in here, in Middle English, there was an adjective, grief.
The same grief we have as in now, but it could mean serious, heavy.
You know bad sins were grief sins.
Is that the same as the grief that is sadness?
Pretty much.
It's that used as an adjective, which apparently the French did too.
But that's gone.
And most of the verb grave is gone.
And you get the sense they were voted off the island because it was just too crowded there.
But there's another way to look at that, that words have an influence on each other completely.
They can both grow together in form, if their senses converge, but they can also drive each other apart.
And the image I came up with in one speech, and Pete Bowers, who was the educator, loved that one.
It's just like gravity.
You know, we use gravity.
Gravity doesn't just pull things together.
You can use gravity to shoot things apart.
That's how we get space shots.
You know, how we get the moon shot.
You loop around this to get to that.
So there's this repulsive power of gravity.
And interestingly, gravity is in that family.
It's from the same Latin, you know, gravis, heavy.
And I just get this feeling of...
The grave that comes along later.
The adjective grave when you say I mean we all use it you know a grave situation it feels like.
It means it's one that put you on the edge of your grave.
Right, that's why I was so surprised.
Right, and you expect that.
It's not, as you go back in time, they get further apart, but their senses don't.
And you can see how, once they get close enough, they capture one another in a gravitational orbit almost.
A grave danger is a deadly danger.
And it's all in the metaphor.
You can't put that in the from.
I can't put it in the from.
But it's there.
It's there.
It's definitely there.
You're saying that, even though we look at the etymology and we go back to Proto-Indo-European, probably they aren't related.
It's reconstructed, so it has those asterisks.
Probably they aren't related etymologically, but that over time they have influenced each other and sort of grown together, because the meanings are so similar.
It's the difference between empirical etymology and human etymology.
You have to account for the human quality in this, which is not going to obey the rules.
Yeah.
Oh, man.
That's so interesting.
Because I tend to focus on the actual, like, where did it come from?
Right.
And so did I for 25 years.
And I finally got to asking myself, well, you know, I'm seeing something.
There's a Germanic quality of the S-N sound or the G-L sound and words that glitter gleam glister, you know.
There's a clustering thing in Germanic.
Germanic was up in the swamp all by itself for hundreds of years, when Latin and Greek were writing to each other.
They did funny stuff with language.
If I had more time, I'd learn more.
If I had 10 more lifetimes, I'd know more Germanic.
But it's really rich back there.
It's a lot different than Latin.
You know, German can do, I think German's a funny language and I'll never convince anyone of that.
It can do a lot.
The one thing it can't do is French.
And the funniest thing in the world is to get a Latin or get a German-French dictionary and just read through what the German form of the French word is.
They're like, you couldn't believe they're the same species.
It's like a Chihuahua and a Great Dane.
So I think you created the site in 2001.
So you've been doing it for a long time.
What got you started?
I drifted into it.
This is a channeled obsession.
I was going to do something anyhow.
I had finished a book on the county where I grew up in.
I had also worked there as a newspaper man, so I knew the place from top to bottom.
And to get into something that deep is just something my mind likes to do.
I could have made a train set.
I could have done a million-word crossword puzzle.
I was going to have to chew on something.
I was interested, really, in getting to be better at writing.
And I understood that to do that you had to understand the different weight in English of the Latinate component and the native component, the stuff we were just talking about.
First, I tried to learn Greek.
I only got so far in that.
I went back to Old English.
I was getting good at that and picking up books.
And I'm starting to write this stuff down as notes to myself.
And a friend says, why don't you publish it?
No one cares what Doug Harper in Pennsylvania thinks while he's trying to teach himself Old English.
And it grew out of that.
And it...
I never intended any of this to happen.
I'd still be happy with a train set.
It's like you might have room for one back there.
I don't need it.
No, I don't need it anymore, to tell you the truth.
This is enough.
This is a lifetime.
I took on a lifetime.
I tried to get away from it.
And every place you go, I hit language and language sends me back to words.
Like, why did you use that word?
Or is that the word in the original?
I keep going back.
You can't get away from it once you've got a hook in it.
I find that too.
Just this morning I had to get up extra early because I scheduled the time wrong for this interview.
And I was thinking, oh, time to pay the piper.
And I'm like, why do we say that?
So often I just find myself like, why do we say that?
And then it's an entry into another podcast episode or another article.
Rabbit holes are the fun of this.
Yeah.
But, yeah, you've got to get up early.
I don't sympathize.
I worked on the night shift for 40 years, so people were always getting me up early.
When you started Atom Online, it wasn't your full-time job then.
Right never has been.
This is a hobby.
I've always treated it as a hobby and i look at what you do and you do a lot of work.
I mean, you work hard.
I couldn't do that.
I certainly couldn't do that and do this too.
This is what i did in the in the, in the middle of the night when i got off my my uh, my work shift on deadline and i still had caffeine pumping in my system.
So i went to the books and started plowing through.
And I love it.
It's just it's beautiful to me.
It's like solitaire.
But once you get the hang of of the searches, it's like swimming laps.
It's fun.
Yeah.
Do you have any sense of over the years, like how many entries you've written or created?
I probably can figure that out if I knew the technology.
My guess is it's somewhere between 54000 and 55000 right now, not counting the separate PIEs because that's not really an entry.
But I mean that's kind of meaningless too, because some of the entries might just be a past participle adjective.
Some of them might be a single word that has 10 different forms of that word explained within it.
So I don't put too much in that.
I think I've got a lot.
We got a lot.
Now there's two of us.
Do you work in like fits and starts or do you just, is it slow and steady wins the race?
You just do like a little bit every day.
It's obsession.
I mean, this is like Tolkien locked himself up and wrote Sam and Frodo into Mordor.
I locked myself away from the world and go dig into, you know, old newspaper ads.
It was every day, at least an hour a day for most of the, how many years has it been?
25.
I got married.
I had a kid.
There was years when I sort of let it – I thought I was done a couple of times.
I never was.
That was a long time ago.
But it's pretty much – but since I've – the last sweep through and my job ended and everything else – it took me a while to get back into it.
I was.
For the first time I felt like I was almost just not done with it, but I no longer felt the magic in there.
It was just, it's been a rough year.
Let's face it.
Everyone had a rough year.
This is my version.
But luckily, by that time, I had a second editor on who kept bringing me back to it.
Like, I found this.
What are we going to do about that?
And also looking at how people were using it online and the expressions that people had about how much they appreciated it.
I really couldn't walk away from it.
Like I said, I can't walk away from it because everywhere I go I hit words and I have to go back to it.
It does make a difference.
What are some of the most surprising?
You know, you said you bump up against words and you're digging through books to find the etymologies.
What are some of the most surprising places that you've found answers to questions?
Well, it's funny because by now the surprising is unsurprising, because you learn to look in places that haven't been looked at.
And the first thing, when you read the OED, the first thing you realize the old print OED, you know the one.
I have back that, that one.
It doesn't.
It's really skimpy on Americanisms.
And you can understand why.
I mean Oxford dons don't want to spend a lot of time reading the sports section of the Chicago Tribune, but that's where a lot of things turn up.
And with newspapers.com, God love them, I've got ink in my blood.
I know how newspapers are done.
I can go in there and just surf that.
And it's often unexpected, but it's not if you think about it.
In that certain window of years, that's where language percolated up into print from the vernacular.
It's going to show up first in you know a Westy Pelger newspaper column or you know a kind of a boxing match in Philadelphia.
All kinds of words running through that.
And we're kind of more focused on those words now, those 20th century weirdo words, because that's those chases.
First of all, that's that's where the fresh ground is.
And they're fun.
They're just fun words to track.
They are.
Yeah.
And then the new word, the slang that surfaces in a newspaper for the first time.
Comic strips, comic strips and editorial comics.
I mean, you can get a lot of stuff I'm seeing there for the first time.
Yeah, that's great.
I love the story of OK, you know, that rose in like the 1820s, 1830s and newspapers.
1839.
You can almost pin the date to it on that one.
It's funny.
But everyone's got the story.
I looked into the story again just recently because NPR was after it.
And it's more complex than it's usually painted.
It's not straight Martin Van Buren.
He's in it.
Really?
But it's not the OK quote.
I mean, that's in it, too.
But it was already in play when they took that as the name.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, it was, it was abbreviation, right?
It was newspaper, newspaper people playing around with language.
Oh, it was really like dock workers.
It was sort of like slang.
It was verbal.
Okay equals all correct.
Misspelled deliberately.
And this is what slang does.
This is the insider.
This is like the British rhyming slang is the one that comes to mind first.
You know, you change it and really deform it enough that if you're on the inside you know what I'm saying.
If you're not, you don't.
It's street slang.
New York, Boston, whatever.
It gets picked up in the election campaign.
Everything got swept up in that election.
It was the 1840s.
It was the first harbinger of what was to come for America.
Yeah, that popularized it.
Yeah, it did, but it was mainly used as i counted through all the uses, it was used by the other side.
The wigs were using it.
Oh, you know as as to because they were.
They were driving what was then social media.
They were way ahead of the democrats.
Democrats weren't thinking and they were just trying to catch up with.
Okay, because the wigs had co-opted it so nicely.
So was it?
Was it an insult then?
Were they using it against?
Both.
It's the beauty of it.
The reason those words survive is because they're ambiguous.
There was one version of the story that said OK, it was the fact that Andrew Jackson actually couldn't spell and he actually wrote OK on something when he meant all correct.
That's the insult version.
The other version is the hip version.
We know we're we're all correct.
We're we're hip.
We're now we're.
I'm using 60s terms.
I'm not using 18.
Don't quote me as 1840s.
It could be both.
You can use it on your side, and it would be a, we're okay.
You can use it on the other side.
They think okay is how you spell.
Perfectly versatile.
That's amazing.
It shows how there are always new things to find about language.
Because I mean, I've read Alan Metcalf's entire book on the word OK and I've never heard that story before.
Because this stuff is new.
It hasn't been out.
You know I don't read the books because by the time they're out I can already go into an archive that wasn't available then.
If they're still going to be there, this is my fear.
This is all digital.
Yeah.
I'm only looking at actual scans of actual pages that have dates in the file, not just written in the file but visible on the page.
You've got to be very careful with this stuff, but it's in there.
And I remember the first time I found something this was actually in Google Books that the OED didn't have.
And I kept looking at it and looking at it.
I think, am I allowed to do this?
Should I be seeing this?
I'm looking around.
Is this a game?
But I can do that five times a day now with their print edition.
Hopefully, I think they're catching up.
I don't even look at the online.
It would be too depressing.
Yeah, no, I remember I recently talked to Ben Zimmer, and we were talking about antedating.
And you get this sense, it's like, you can just do that?
Anyone with the time can now go look at all the digital databases.
And it's not that we're smarter than they were.
We have more stuff.
We have this huge haystack, and we have this needle finder called, you know, internet search.
I'm not smarter than anyone.
But I live in a time when suddenly this opened up.
Like, they invented glass-bottom boats to sail across history.
I'm getting one.
Yeah.
That's fun.
I was going to ask you about this later, but Amir, one of my followers on Mastodon, wanted to know what you think about the rise of AI and digital corpora.
Do you think it's going to be useful?
Do you think etymologists should be worried?
What are your thoughts?
Digital databases have helped you so much.
This is a new digital thing.
What are your thoughts about AI?
That's the question everyone should be asking everybody right now, not just about entomology.
Entomology, too.
Insects are involved.
And the answer is, you know, it's funny.
I live now out here in Lancaster County and have the whole time I've done this among the Amish.
And you get to know the Amish, and it's like they're not trying to not be us.
They're trying to choose what they admit into the house, right?
You know, you, the young guys can have a car, but you have to park it somewhere else.
You know that's we can have a.
You can have a phone on your job, but you can't have one in your house.
It's a case by case.
So here's fire.
You know, AI is fire.
Fire is a, you know, a, a useful servant and a dangerous master.
You have to decide, you have to know what it's good at.
Almost everything that's allowed me to make an immortal line is other than a condensation of what's in those books, not just the big blue one.
A lot of them is the online archives.
Google did that.
Google scanned all those books, put them out there in a way that you could see the actual pages.
What's next?
Google doesn't want me to look at that as much as it wants me to ask their AI what to do.
You know what it said in the past.
What happened in the past?
That's never going to work for me.
But a lot of people will do that.
And now it's become a master and not a servant.
And it's a danger.
And what I fear ultimately.
I mean Google has disappeared things in the past when they weren't profitable to Google.
It's very hard now to find the old Usenet archives where so much language comes up in the internet jargon in the 90s.
You know, the old archives of those I don't even know where they are anymore.
They're not really easily easy to date use.
So they're kind of hard for my purposes, but I don't want them to go away.
Google can make things go away.
And, you know, newspaper.com might not be there forever.
And I wonder how many of those books that Google digitalized out of libraries and I look at the front covers and I see where they came from.
I wonder how many of those have been deaccessioned now.
I wonder how many of those even still exist now in the physical form, with the real words and the real date.
I don't like thinking down that path.
I'm old, so I'm not going to be here when it happens, but I've said that in the past and been wrong.
Yeah man, I never thought about that before, that those books in Google Books might not even exist in physical form anymore.
That's depressing.
So are you seeing a drop in traffic to your site because of AI?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely.
I mean, all you have to do is go look at, follow a thread.
I mean I don't do social media, but I follow Reddit because it seems to have more intelligent discussions, at least these days.
And you look at how people are posting, well, this is what Google AI told me about this.
And someone says, well, why didn't you just search a website and get a better?
And he says, well, it's the same thing.
It's just like letting Google do the search instead of having me do the search.
No, it's not.
No, it's not.
It's not.
And that mindset is out there.
You can see that coming.
I mean, I'm exactly the kind of thing.
What I do is what AI wants to do.
Google's had etymologies at the top of their search results for years.
Even when you search etymoline word, they'll give you their version.
They've wanted this.
You know, Google wants to be the whole Internet, I think.
This is one of the first places they want.
They feel like this is theirs.
This is their job to tell you entomologies.
That's easy.
Computers can do that.
No, they can't.
But you'll find out.
Yeah, no, we're seeing the same thing.
And yeah, those Google snippets, you know, years ago, were the beginning, the beginning of the end, I think.
You know it worries me, because you know I think people like you and maybe me, we will always do this because we love it.
But like AI is built on our material.
And if people don't come to our website, then we have a lot less of a reason to to write the things we write.
If no, but if only ai is reading it then, like you say we, we like to hear thanks.
Right, the the ai that's scraping our side is never going to say thanks.
You know, and i think that you know, i do it because i love it and you obviously do it because you love it, but the incentives help us to keep doing it and some people aren't going to be able to keep doing it just for love, and and then the information won't be there.
If you were starting out today, if I were starting out today, we'd look at – I would never have done this thing.
I couldn't have done this.
This could only happen when the thing was – the internet was new and you could sort of make your muscle your way into things and find a way to be useful.
And you could be just a person who likes to do a thing and you put it online and other people say oh, that's useful.
I will visit that and like it.
Right, right.
And now it's going to be a different experience in the future.
And it's a shame because you lose – I actually kind of have a perverse hope that, like Fahrenheit 451, if we hang on long enough, they'll come around.
I think that the AI –
It will always do certain things better than I could as a writer.
But it can't do this.
It really can't.
And I don't think so.
I don't believe people are going to trust it because it's now absorbing itself and getting tangled up in its own lies and confusions.
I kind of feel good.
I took advantage of the Dr. Johnson clause.
And if you're writing a dictionary as a solo act, you get to throw in a few jibes and asides from place to place in it, which I did.
And the G-A-O-L spelling of jail was the first one, and probably the most noticed, which is a direct response to Johnson's dislike of Americans.
But the...
You get to also appreciate that throwing in a few oddball entries really stops the ripoff artists who just ripped your site and then pretended they wrote it.
And, oh, no, this is all my original research.
Yeah.
Did you write that joke?
Because that's in my site, too.
And now I like them because they trip up, I hope, trip up AI and make them.
I hope it's like one of my stupid asides turns up in an AI answer somewhere, because I'm sabotaging it as actively as I can.
What are they called?
Are they, what is it, Mount Weasels?
Yeah, there's some smarty pants term for it.
Yeah, those are fake entries that people, dictionaries put.
Well, not quite a fake entry, but like Johnson's was in.
You know, oats he defines as a grain that in England feeds the horses and in Scotland the people, something like that.
Didn't like Scots.
It was politics back in the States.
But, you know, you can slip things like that in.
Webster has things.
Everyone who's a solo act will do that.
So I claimed it as my birthright.
But the big dictionaries, they do.
They actually made up entries that they put in so that they could tell if another dictionary had stolen their words.
Yes.
And they also sometimes screwed up entries and made up words without meaning to.
Doored being the famous one.
Right.
One of my favorites, too.
Yeah, it's beautiful.
I mean Dictionary.
We could nerd out all day on Dictionary where we'd probably lose half your audience.
I know.
We should tell them.
Doored is, it was, the entry was D or, the word or, D or D for, I think, density.
And then someone misread it and decided it should be the word doored.
Right.
It was like the index card said D or D.
I guess it might have forgot to put the periods after the Ds.
And the person typing it in said D or D.
There it went and there it remains.
Because this is the beauty of the things once you accidentally make it a word, it stays a word if it's in the dictionary.
You know the type, the typo, typographical errors in the printings of shakespeare's plays, which are rather shabbily done.
In many cases they're words because they're in shakespeare.
We're pretty sure he didn't mean that word, but there it is on the page, so it's a word.
If shakespeare uses it, it's a word in your language.
Well listen, let's go back.
You worked in news for many years and news is one of the other etymologies that we were going to talk about, because there's this folk etymology where some people think it means north east, west and south for all the information from around the land.
And that's really just not true.
So early – I think, maybe.
I don't know.
Tell me.
I'm going to share here again and –
We're going to look at news.
Let's look at the news.
You know, people think this because they're told this and they're told this in it's.
It is either a joke or a deliberate act of vandalism.
It's not a very good example of either.
I think the discovery of an acronym origin is now a game and it's not a discovery.
It's the invention of one.
All right, let's look at the entries.
News.
Here we go.
Late 14th century.
Your first clue that this is not going to be an acronym because those are all modern.
It means new things.
It's the plural of new.
The word new.
Use as a noun.
And there's a French precedent for it.
You can see how it comes to English.
I remember thinking that was really funny the first time I realized that news is just new stuff.
It's even simpler than the phony explanation, which is usually the simpler one.
Yeah.
This is great because I have written about this twice.
I once wrote about the whole problem.
I once wrote about that particular word.
And I get to link both of them here because they appear in this part called columns that nobody ever goes to.
And that's where you'd find them.
If you click this one, this is the big one.
Ingenious thrashing.
It's under columns up here, and you can see the whole stack of them.
Talia wrote some, I wrote some.
It's down in there, but you can link it directly from the news entry.
And this goes into the whole history and problems of the acronym origins.
What interests me is less the origins than the stories themselves.
When did people start inventing things like Posh for Port Out, Starboard Home Golf for You Know What the other ones?
That itself is an etymological thread because it's changing the language.
When does that begin?
How does that start?
It's really modern.
It's very recent.
Commercial advertising and the military around the time of World War I kicked this off.
Oh, why?
Because they're shorthanding.
They're using, you know, telegram.
I mean, you're sending Morse codes, things like that.
There's certainly, compression becomes necessary and once it becomes a habit, then it becomes a game.
You know, the american civil war, which i studied extensively, was one of my obsessions before this reading through the official records, reading through an account of a civil war history.
Now abbreviations are everywhere.
You know usct, you know army of the potomac, you know the army northern virginia.
They didn't use any of that.
They spelled everything out in every single record of the civil war.
They could have, but they didn't.
By World War I, the military is doing that.
I think it has to do with a lot of.
It has to do with, you know, court communication.
You know like AMP, you know TIA.
I mean, if you read the military slang of World War I, it's full of those kind of things.
It's not going to be old.
If anything is supposed to be an acronym origin before about 1900, you're probably not.
It's almost, people didn't think that way.
It was there to be done, but their minds didn't see the language that way.
And it's so funny because people were handwriting much more before then.
So you'd think they would have more incentives to shorten things.
You'd think it just didn't.
It didn't.
It didn't.
You know, OK is interestingly a very early example of it because that is an acronym.
But it was only used in a slang twisty sense.
They used the trick there to make slang, not to make language.
And the whole point of it was to be obscure.
Again, we're looking at the clouds.
We're seeing what's going on around the words.
But that's where the tantalizing things are.
So news, I mean, and the other one that's linked from it directly addresses the word news.
And what it doesn't come from.
And this goes on and on and on.
But it's funny because it starts out, I'm pretty sure, as, yeah, it was a joke.
And it's an old joke.
That goes back to 1640. but it was a joke again.
It was, it was humor, not language building that they had the word news.
And it was kind of, I mean, even then it's kind of obscure.
It's new is not usually a noun in English.
You know, the construction of it is French.
And so it sort of feels a little odd in English, which opens the door to this kind of playfulness.
And they made a joke of it and they put it in joke books and everyone thought Oh, that's pretty funny.
A hundred years, you know so much for us being smarter than the 18th century.
And What did Randall Jarrell once write?
Soon we shall know everything the 18th century didn't know and nothing it did, and then we'll be difficult to live with.
Yeah.
So for, I think we're done with the main episode.
We have a lot more to talk about for our bonus segment for our Grammarpalusians.
But you know, I mean, I usually ask people where they can find you.
But I think we know where we can find you, which is edamonlinecom.
I will tell you one thing.
I've both made myself easy to find and hard to find there, because I don't want to encourage people.
The same email that i can get 30 times a day just from why did you say oh, the nationalists, everything.
However, if you go and i'm going to share screen again to show you where to find this is a secret for for you people, only down at the bottom way, down at the bottom down here copyright, copyright.
If you that's got, see the little fingery, you click on that and you get.
You can, it should take.
Whatever your chosen email is mine's proton, I'm on it.
It's theoretically that's on every page, but it's not easy.
It's not easy to notice if you're in a rage and just looking to strangle me because of what I wrote, but it's down there.
That's for you guys.
If you click on your name in the copyright line, that's where your email is.
It should automatically open in your, I don't know.
I don't write to myself, so I don't know how it works.
Sneaky.
Very sneaky, Doug.
Oh yeah.
Oh, I'm full of that kind of thing.
I love it well.
Thank you so much for being here.
Thank you for having me.
