i want to start a new thing - wikipedia chains.
wiki is addictive. if you want just a teeny little factoid for parlor conversation, it's great. like...
what was the name of that dude who shot all those people in texas in the '60s?
oh yeah! charles whitman! thanks, wiki!
so through a saturday morning surf i go from charles whitman to... dexedrine, which whitman was prescribed for his ailing mental health.
from dexedrine i click on "hallucinations" and i see this:
"Occasionally television programs and movies let the viewer see hallucinations experienced by one of the characters. For example, an episode of Casualty (TV series) showed a patient's delirium tremens hallucination, live-acted by a tarantula."
click on tarantula. i realize that "tarantula" was named after the city of taranto in italy. wow, cool! geographic link!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taranto
"In ancient times, residents of the town of Taranto, upon being bitten by the large local Wolf Spider, Lycosa tarentula, would promptly do a long vigorous dance like a Jig. "
click on jig! fuckin' a!
"The word "jig" seems to have cognates in various Germanic languages that describe a certain type of repetitive motion. Compare, for instance, Icelandic geiga (which means "to rove at random" or "to take a sudden unexpected direction"), German geigen ("a back and forth motion, usually with the bow on the strings of the violin"), and Bernese German gyg-ampfe ("to seesaw")."
so, what the hell. sigur ros, bjork, fermented shark meat. let's click on icelandic and see how thos volcano-dwelling weirdos talk.
icelandic, cool. it's spoken in iceland, surprise surprise, but also in a town called gimli, manitoba. i'm too uninterested to find out anything about manitoba that doesn't have to do with louis riel, so... click on "old norse" because i am curious about norwegian black metal and its anachronistic embrace of asatru and viking culture.
ah, old norse and old english had loanwords.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loanword
Loanwords in English
English has many loanwords. In 1973, a computerised survey of about 80,000 words in the old Shorter Oxford Dictionary (3rd edition) was published in Ordered Profusion by Thomas Finkenstaedt and Dieter Wolff. Their estimates for the origin of English words were as follows:
- French, including Old French and early Anglo-French: 28.3%
- Latin, including modern scientific and technical Latin: 28.24%
- Germanic languages, including Old and Middle English: 25%
- Greek: 5.32%
- No etymology given or unknown: 4.03%
- Derived from proper names: 3.28%
- All other languages contributed less than 1%
However, if the frequency of use of words is considered, words from Old and Middle English occupy the vast majority.
so... from being curious about a mass murderer, in exactly 8 clicks i go from him to dexedrine to hallucination to tarantula to tarantos to jig to icelandic to old norse to loanword. i've learned 1 thing i wanted to know (charles whitman), two things that were interesting (tarantula-tarantos) and now i have actual percentages and statistics for a part of a lesson i've taught 200 times.
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