Word of the day: sept

It's not what you think.  Not even remotely.

I'm not referring to the Game of Thrones equivalent of a church (albeit it's the same spelling), nor any other meanings derived from septem, Latin for seven.

Definition

A sept is a division of a (large) family, especially a division of a clan.  It's particularly applicable to Scotland and Ireland, where there can be large groupings of people with identical surnames.


Context

"In seventeenth-century Scotland Clan Campbell stood by itself as a separate race, almost a separate state, whose politics were determined by the whim of its ruling prince.  Built upon the ruins of many little septs, it excelled [sic] in numbers and wealth every other Highland clan."

From John Buchan's Montrose (1928, p213), a biography of James Graham (1612 - 1650), Marquess of Montrose.  He was a Scottish nobleman in the time of the English Civil War, who fought on the royalist side against the Covenanters.  This was a Scottish movement which replaced the Anglican hierarchy of bishops with an assembly of elders, from which arose the Presbytarian church.  Montrose was on the losing side in several ways, but his victories gave him a good reputation as a military strategist.

Etymology

Sept appears to be a corruption of sect; State Papers from 1535 and 1537 refer respectively to secte then septe; possibly influenced by the Latin saeptum (fence, enclosure), which also gave rise to the anatomy term septum, for a partition between two cavities.  Sept is cognate (language derivation-equivalent) with the German equivalent, sippe.

History of English Podcast: a real treat

Here we have a real gem.  Something that ticks a lot of boxes for me.

The History of English Podcast is a history of the English language, but it's so much more than its prosaic name suggests.

Yes, it's history and linguistics, but it actually crosses several disciplines, including archeology, evolution and genetics.


It has a wealth of information and insights in a number of areas.  For me, it fills in a lot of gaps in my knowledge, and by this I mean it better systematises my understanding of several key fields of study, including the English language, alphabets and writing, comparative linguistics and the history of ancient and classical civilisations.

It's also clear and lucid - to the point of being slightly repetitive (which is not necessarily a bad thing for a podcast - you're not always paying full attention, are you?)

In common with several of my preferred podcasts, it's presented by a gifted enthusiast rather than a professional.  Kevin Stroud is a lawyer by trade - hence his interest - who would seem to come from one of the Carolinas. He has a regional US accent which is reasonably easy to listen to - except when it comes to words like wheel ('will') and field ('filled').

He's been at it since about July 2012, at the rate of about one episode every two weeks.  He'd already put out about 11 episodes when I came across it, and it was quick, easy and pleasurable to catch up.  I don't know how long he can keep it up - he's already finished the Greeks, and will do the Romans later this month.  But I'd be perfectly happy to listen if he wants to string it out.

The History of English Podcast is my vote for podcast of the year.

Word of the day: Bogomil

Bogomil was a 10th Century Bulgarian priest. And a heretic - in a time when being heretical was often a better route to fame than being really orthodox.

Their heterodoxy was belief in creation by an evil anti-god - ie the devil.  But I suspect a larger problem of heresy may have been their rejection of the church hierarchy, which could have been more anathematic than religious heterodoxy.  This seems to have emerged at a time of increasing stratification of their society, which encompassed enserfdom and alienation of church ritual.


They were gnostic, which encompassed both the anti-god and anti-establishment hazards - and were counted as spiritual ancestors of the French Cathars, against whom the pope decreed a crusade - which contributed to the wiping out of gnosticism in Europe.


The church also propagated some nasty rumours against the Bogomils, including that they were sodomites.  In France, Bogomils were seen as equivalent to Bulgarians, known as "Bougres".  From this comes the English word bugger.

 

Word of the day: Microbiome

This is clearly a portmanteau word: microbe + genome. Microbe refers to microscopic organisms - in this case, bacteria; genome refers to the sum total of genetic material in an organism.

There's a community of bacteria living within humans that performs functions essential for human life. Scientific American (Mar-2012) says there's at least 10 times as many bacteria cells as human cells in the human body (but those bacteria are a whole lot smaller, with much, much simpler genome).

So microbiome is the genetic material of the [useful] bacteria in the human body. In such a situation, it differs from human to human, so things like this are usually measured on a sampling basis.

According to that Scientific American article (Backseat Drivers, p11), the sum total of all genetic material housed in a human body is then called the hologenome.


Small bone to pick here. The human genome is generally thought of as referring to the genetic material (23 chromosomes of DNA) housed in the nucleus of each cell. But there's extra DNA not in the nucleus: mitochondrial DNA, used to generate energy, passed on only maternally, and originally passed to humans by bacteria. This DNA is often left off discussion of genomes.  In this case, I'd say they'd be including mitochondria for the sake of completeness.

Another small bone to pick. Microbiome is listed in Wikipedia as the sum total of microscopic organisms in a particular environment, and hologenome is used as an idea of co-evolution with microbes, roughly speaking. So the Scientific American article is pushing the envelope a bit.

So even within a scientific community the meaning of words can change over time until/unless locked down.

Further reading (both from Scientific American, as it happens):

• What happens when those useful bacteria disappear
• The appendix is useful - for the microbiome

Word of the day: ericacious

Urk! What does this mean? On Monday night I saw it on the back of some plant food meant for acid-loving plants such as azalias, orchids and gardenias (which I love), and ericacious plants.

So if you get it wrong, you're in trouble.

The first clue was that the list of plants included heather. The second: when I looked up the word, it referred me to ericaceous. Now that's a bit like erica and herbaceous.

So it refers to the genus ericaceae - which is, in fact, a family that includes heathers, and grows in harsh and acidic environments.

Although I would expect the two spellings to be used interchangeably, anecdotally it looks like the spelling ericaceous is used in a strict botanical sense, while ericacious seems to be used mostly in a gardening context.

Anyway, it looks like I'll restrict this plant food to the gardenia and the orchids...

Word of the day: defenestration

Of course, after a word arc culminating in Hussites, it's hard to resist adding defenestration.

If you've learnt just a little French, you'll recognise the root of this word is common to fenetre,  French for window.  Defenestration is the act of throwing someone out a window.

In 1419, seven town councillors were thrown out the window in Prague.  This was not trivial: they were thrown to their deaths.

This very event is the origin of the word defenestration, and it also precipitated the Hussite wars.

And in a spectacular effort to entrench the word in history, almost two hundred years later they held another defenestration event - this time, from Prague castle.

As you might expect, that precipitated another war - the Thirty Years War.

Word of the day: Hussite

hussar...

huzzah...


finally to:                Hussite

 - which was the destination of this arc of words.



Jan Hus was an early protestant (ie non-orthodox Christian), in the days when that was a fatal move.  Bohemian in name, but not by nature.

To cut a long story short, the end (of the beginning, so to speak) came about in 1414 when he attended a Great Council of the Christian church in Constance.  This council was originally convened to resolve the existence of three (!) opposing popes.  The eastern orthodox church was invited too - it was hoped the council could solve the big Christian schism between the eastern and western churches. However, those issues proved rather difficult, so for diversion they decided to condemn a heretic.  Jan?  Oops... but you've given me safe conduct to this council!  Well, not any more...  so they burned him at the stake.



(... once that was out of the way, they eventually sorted out the popes - by booting out all the others and electing a new one.  The schism?  Well, that was just too hard.)

So, as you can imagine, being a Hussite was a rather dangerous calling at the time.


The Hussite wars followed over the next twenty years.  Although ultimately not too succcessful (for the Hussites), it's a significant chapter in Bohemian history.


Where did I encounter this word?  In a podcast called Europe From Its Origins.  Dense, academic, sometimes quite polemic.  It's put together by Joe Hogarty; his favourite word is Christendom.

Word of the day: Huzzah

I'm meandering towards a particular word that sounds somewhat similar to this one and yesterday's - and all have a martial aspect to them.

"Huzzah!" was once a battle cry.  It was also used something like 'hooray' - and modern usage is probably something in between, albeit more as a joke/archaicism than anything else.

As a battle cry, its origins are debatable, although - again! - it has been claimed to have come to Europe from as far back as the invading Mongols in the 13th century. (A little too tempting to link it up to yesterday's hussar, maybe.)

In any case, it was clearly used by the British military at some point, in a similar manner to 'banzai'.  Except, well, British, and not Japanese.


Where did I encounter this word?  Someone mentioned it after the last one.

Word of the day: Hussar

I just noticed these words are rather top-heavy in the area of sciences so far, so I'm veering in the direction of another of my other interests, history.

A hussar is a specific type of cavalryman - light cavalry, in fact, originating in the 1400s.  That means we have a military horseman, the light simply meaning not armoured.  Which makes sense, really.  The golden hordes (the Mongol invaders into Europe and Asia in the 1300s and 1400s) had effectively taught the Europeans the benefits of cavalry attack (speed) over defence.

Early 20th Century Prussian hussar

The hussar form apparently rose to prominence in Hungary in the late 1400s, where they proved quite sucessful, thence were hired elsewhere in Europe as mercenaries.  Various forms then spread throughout Europe over the next 400 years.  I've seen pictures of hussars of a number of different nationalities, mainly from France through to northern and eastern Europe.  Variants of the ceremonial dress - particularly the hat - seems to be the nearest I can get to a unifying feature throughout the period and continent.


Where did I encounter this word?  It was uncomfortably close to another upcoming word, and I wanted to clarify each of them.

Word of the day: copepod

A copepod is a type of crustacean.  It might make you think of arthropod, the phylum (body type) that crustaceans belong to, but the prefix -pod means foot, of course.  The name copepod comes from Greek, meaning oar- or handle- and -foot.

The copepoda are actually a subclass, in the Linnean classification.  Which mainly means there are quite a few species of them.

If you look at the photo in the Wikipedia entry, it actually looks like plankton.  I didn't know crustaceans could be planktonic - or vice versa.  There you go.
However, plankton is just a general term for small marine life (either animal or plant) that lives near the surface of the ocean.  So things that feed on plankton are just feeding on... "stuff".

 And now to what brought me to this word (something Wikipedia doesn't mention): some species of copepod are bioluminescent, meaning they emit light.  The actual mechanism involvese a combination of two substances: luciferin, a pigment that reacts with oxygen; and luciferase, an enzyme (a protein catalyst).  Interestingly enough, this very mechanism has evolved separately in a several different organisms, including fireflies and anglerfish.  I guess it shows that this kind of mutation is:
a) useful
b) not too hard to arrive at (for example, just a couple of point mutations).


 Where did I encounter this word? A few days ago, on the bus.  In New Scientist (12 May 2012); another word I'd never seen before.

Word of the day: Peplum

A peplum is a garment like a blouse or top, with a small skirt-ish sort of thing at the bottom.



From an article in the Guardian:

"It won't make you look thin, men don't find it sexy and it gets crushed on public transport..."

Damn right on the first two at least.  Still, the article then asks: "...how do you carry it off?" - and you know it has to come from the fashion section.

Reminds me of those hideous bubble dresses.  Glad they're pretty much gone.

Okay, yes I admit: it's the actuality I dislike more than the word.  Yet I'm none too fond of the word either.  It comes from the Greek word for tunic.  There's also Peplos, a kind of women's garment in ancient Greece.

For further information see the Wikipedia article overskirt.  I got the image from there because I couldn't find a more exemplary demonstration of what I don't like about it.



Where did I encounter this word?  Saturday, in the fashion pages of the Herald's colour supplement.  Why was I even looking at this page?  I think I was just thumbing past it, when this word sprung in front of my eyes before I could turn past it.  Yet again I thought, hang on, this is not a word.  But the fickle finger of fashion doubtness churns through new words faster than... well, butter, I guess.

Word of the Day: Omnium

Omnium - Sounds rather singular and meaningful, doesn't it?

Well it's not. It's just a new-ish olympic category - a multiple event for track cycling.

Wikipedia says the word is Latin for "all around the thing" - although with what little I know of Latin, I'd guess it's more like "all thing".

Don't know why this word seems to have been snaffled for the Olympics - and track cycling, at that. It's a very generic construct. Maybe there was no Latin word for Cycling - yet Latin is constantly being updated for the modern world.

I am not too fond of this modern construct/usurpation.  Tomorrow's word is another recent coining that gets my goat.

Where did I encounter this word? Sunday, listening to radio, got pulled up by a word I'd never heard before.  The casual disbursement of the word itself was more noteworthy than the context.

Word of the day: Cardiomyocyte

A cardiomyocyte is a heart muscle cell.

Paraphrased from New Scientist, 5 May 2012: After a heart attack, fibroblast cells form scar tissue on the damaged areas, but they don't pump properly like cardiomyocytes. Dzau (Duke University) used a virus to deliver four microRNAs to switch the fibroblasts to cardiomyocytes. Viruses are, more or less, RNA (or DNA) factories. That is, they are much smaller than normal cells, and spend their lives using a host cell's own mechanisms to manufacture more genetic material.  Preferably its own, but with the benefits of modern genetic engineering, clearly they can be taken advantage of for the benefit of the host cell.

microRNA: short strips of RNA that bind to messenger RNA to stop genes being expressed.

It's not clear to me whether this happens at transcription inside the cell nucleus (like epigenetics, but acting on the RNA), or translation (that is, preventing the ribosome properly decoding some of the RNA into proteins outside the cell nucleus. Either way, it's pretty clever to be able to:
a) identify the switches that change a fibroblast to a cardiomyocyte. Possibly just a function of what proteins are expressed at the ribosome
b) engineer a virus so that it expresses the right set of RNA strands to do the trick
c) deliver the virus to just the right cells. 


(I note that there's been another effort to achieve the same outcome - fibroblast to cardiomyocyte - in a completely different way: using stem cells: http://stemcells.nih.gov/info/scireport/chapter9.asp) 



Where did I encounter this word? Yesterday, in that New Scientist (I'm behind in my reading!)


 

Word of the day: Chevrotain

Another word with evolutionary significance.

 Chevrotain 

A chevrotain is also known as a mouse deer (which can be somewhat deceptive).  The name comes from French, and roughly translates as 'little goat'.

It does look halfway between a mouse and a deer, but it's more meaningful to think of it as a very small deer: you couldn't get a real-life mix between a rodent and an ungulate (they're clearly genetically too distant).

They're actually a group of species (called a 'family' in the old, Linnean classification) found in Africa and Southeast Asia - with some variation in appearance between species.  This grouping includes the smallest ungulates in the world.
The rodent features are misleading, and would be an example of convergent evolution - that is, unrelated animals that evolves similar features for similar environmental niches.

Where did I encounter this word?  This is what makes this species significant: recently there was a Wikipedia feature article on giraffes.  They're (even-toed) ungulates - which evolved from creatures that looked rather like this 54 million years ago.

Word of the Day: Ungulate

First: Why?

Why something as staid as Word of the Day?

It arose from a comment someone made to me about a man of letters who made a habit of learning a new word every day.  I don't remember who that was; I'm sure there's a lot of people who have made such a resolution over the years.

But it struck me that I don't need to make the effort, because I encounter at least one new word every day.  If nothing else, in my readings on history, science, evolution and genetics.  It wouldn't be hard to document just one per day, and it would oblige me to properly find out what it meant.

However, the exercise is not without its pitfalls - not the least of which is the interruption in the flow of reading, the communication of information.  Not trivial when I'm deeply immersed in a train of thought.  Jump off that train, make a note, catch it again, recapture the meaning and the mood.  Later, I have to fit in the time to do the research and write it up.  Not always trivial.  In fact, since I started this, I realise I have a bad habit of glossing over new or half-understood words.  I find I'm not picking up half the candidate words - there's just too many.  In general, I'll try to make them totally new.

And so the second question: Why something as staid as ungulate?

Well, there will be days like that.  For some of these words, I didn't know the full meaning or nuance; for others, it makes sense to be clear on the understanding of a word that's needed for another word.  Like this one.

Ungulate

Do you know properly what this word means?

Of course, an ungulate is effectively a hoofed animal, but the word refers to a specific grouping of mammals. They move on the tips of their toes, which have hooves. (they'd be good at ballet, hey?)

There are odd- and even-toed ungulates, which actually delineates which toes the animals rest their weight on (some of the toes are quite vestigal, and so barely visible).

Despite what wikipedia says in its intro, this is not a proper cladistic group of animals. That is, the word does not describe a grouping of a single ancestral animal and all its descendants. Otherwise, you'd have to call dolphins and other cetaceans ungulates, because some ungulates are closer in ancestry to cetaceans than they are to other ungulates.

So this word is not very helpful scientifically - despite which, I'm sure some biologists use it informally to communicate meaning to a general audience.

  Where did I (last) encounter this word? I found it integral to the next word of the day - it helps to understand this one first.

word of the day: Pareidolia

We all know this phenomenon: pareidolia is the perception of significance in vague/random images or sounds.

Courtesy of the wonderful Flea Snobbery website:

Zeugma and the uncertainty of language

Your word of the day is zeugma.

"Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana"

A slow odyssey was kicked off some time last year, when this old joke appeared in a rather apocryphal column in the Herald. It was cited as an example of a figure of speech called a zeugma, and attributed to Groucho Marx.

After some reflection, I've come to doubt the latter, and disbelieve the former.


It often seems to be ascribed to Groucho, but I've read and seen a lot, both by him and about him, without coming across this.

Zeugma is a literary or rhetoric device originating with the Romans (who borrowed the term from the Greek for "yoke"). How does it work? That's where the odyssey comes in, because I've found any number of different definitions of it, and the related term syllepsis.

The consensus definitions seem to be as follows:
zeugma - one term governs two different parts of a sentence.

"during the race he broke the record and his leg" (Take our word)

"to wage war and peace" (Macquarie Dictionary)

syllepsis - one term governs two clauses in different, sometimes inappropriate senses.

"he fought with desparation and his trusty sword" (Macquarie Dictionary)

"he carried the strobe light and the responsibility for the lives of his men." (Wikipedia)

Any more than those definitions, and there's disagreement. Mostly on whether the yoke term applies equally, differently, or incongruously, to the two object (acted upon) clauses.

But the "time flies" joke would seem to be neither zeugma nor syllepsis, because the pivotal term appears twice, albeit in different senses. The only source that accepts it as a zeugma is the one that originally piqued me, and the column in which it was included was certainly no expert.

I have to say that in the six-odd months since I first looked at it, I've seen the definitions on various web sites modify - particularly Wikipedia's entry. Its latest take is that syllepsis is a type of zeugma.

You pay your money and you take your choice. For such an ancient term, it's surprising to see how much disagreement there is. Check out these sources yourself - if you dare:

Macquarie
Wikipedia
Sylva Rhetoricae
Take Our Word


16-Jan: PS If the joke needs explaining, it's about those pesky fruit flies.