As I've recently been engrossed building my resume from scratch, words and their origins have been on my mind. All the rules have been thrown out, but one: "Show, don't tell." So in trying to "show" "organizational wizard" achievements throughout my working history, I got stumped more than a few times and in ways a dictionary or thesaurus couldn't fix.
That got me to thinking which in turn got me to: Why do we (“we” being the “English language”) have so many different words for one action, e.g., “thinking”? There’s musing, contemplating, ruminating, mulling over, considering, weighing, racination (just learned that one from reading Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union).
All this thinking brought me outside for fresh air, but no answers. I did see a particularly large banana slug, though and that brought me back inside to discover the connection between "etymology" [the origin of words, tracing developing of a word's parts since its earliest recorded occurrence in the language where it is formed] and "entomology" [branch of zoology dealing with insects, from the Greek word entomon, meaning notched, refers to segmented body plan of the insect].
What?!
Whoa! Isn't language cool? :)
ReplyDeleteTotally cool!
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