What Works?

I’ve been studying Grimm’s Law with a couple of my kiddos lately. It takes more than one session to go in depth, but it’s a beautiful framework for learning more about PIE *roots, word families, spelling choices, and vocabulary. I will sometimes give them a little assignment, like looking up Classical relatives for native English words. Recently, we’ve been looking at the voiceless stops in native English words that are voiced in Classical relatives, like ten~decade and tooth~dentist, or acre~agriculture and carve~graph. Often, the <g> in the Classical words has undergone lenition, or ‘softened,’ over time, so we get pairs like cold~congeal or kind~genus~genuine. Sometimes, the /k/ was lost diachronically, but the <k> remains in the <kn> digraph, as in pairs like know~gnostic or knee~genuflect. A <kn> does an optimal job of marking a relationship to a <g> elsewhere; an <n> alone cannot do that.

The corresponding phonemes or graphemes needn’t be initial to the element, as evidenced by acre~agriculture. Sometimes they’re final, too. One such example is the native English word work and its bound Classical cognates, <erg>, <urge>, and <orge>. The <erg> element surfaces in energy, ergonomic, and allergy. The <all> in the compound <all+erg+y> denotes ‘other,’ just like it does in <all+o+phone> or <all+o+path+y>. An allergy is, morphologically speaking, the result of something ‘other’ ‘working’ against you.

The second in the list is not the free Latin base element <urge>, as in I urge you to reconsider or I’ve got an urgent need. Rather, it’s the bound Hellenic element in compounds such as dramaturge and metallurgy. A metallurgist works with metal, and a dramaturge is the Hellenic word for playwright. In fact, the <wright> element is another native cousin, as is <wrought>. Wrought iron has been worked, and an ironwright works with iron.

The same Greek root that gives us <urge> also compounds in George, but it kept the <o> instead of its <u> from the Greek <ου>; the name <ge+orge> means ‘farmer,’ literally, one who ‘works’ the ‘earth.’ That version also shows up in organ, organism, organic, and orgy, but I’ll let you explore that last one on your own. The <organ> family takes on new life in Latin, whence organelle and organize.

A Greek <arg> derives historically from the privative prefix <a->, as in atypical, and the root of <erg>, so the <arg> denotes ‘not working.’ It surfaces in lethargic and in the name of the inert gas argon. Get it? Inert? Not working?

Speaking of not working, everywhere I go is short staffed. You too, I bet. From the post office to food service to medical facilities, there are long waits and long apologies. We are in a kind of upheaval, aren’t we? COVID has brought so many changes, not least to businesses and economies. Every time I hear about this, on the news or from a friend or at the doctor’s office, I am reminded that the Black Death not only ended feudalism and restructured the economy across Europe, but also transformed education and literacy in myriad ways that helped usher in the Modern English era.

Because I was online when online wasn’t cool — i.e., pre-COVID — my day-to-day business and worklife didn’t really change much with the pandemic like most other adults’ did. I did notice an uptick of K-12 teachers in my classes; many of them were home more and had professional development dollars not going to travel, so they signed up for extra classes. I’ve heard from them that the experience of taking multiple LEXinars at once or in close sequence was transformative, and have I’ve received a tidy collection of love notes from teachers who found that my classes were nourishment during an insanely trying school year. Lucky me.

Recently, I started a new year-long class on This Language, A River: A History of English, a book by two of my beloved teachers. The whole front-end of the class is grammar, though, because you can’t talk about language change without being able to talk about language. Chapter 2 is a long chapter called Grammar Fundamentals. We covered much of that chapter the last time we met, and at the end of class, I asked for a show of hands for who had taken Grammar for Grown Ups already. Most of the class’s 25 participants raised their hands. They agreed that Chapter 2’s content was familiar and coherent, and not at all difficult, because they already had a solid understanding from G4GU. That class will improve your understanding of grammar no matter where it is when you start. Ask anyone who’s taken it. I’m offering both of these year-long classes again in 2022.

In addition to LEXinars, I will be teaming up with Douglas Harper from The Online Etymology Dictionary for our 10th annual Etymology! conference. This one will be the third one online. I desperately would love to meet in person again, but at the time of our initial planning (and still!), COVID is kneecapping travel plans and ability for too many of my clients. This year’s theme centers around food and food words, and we’ll have another online cooking demo on Friday or Saturday evening. Dates and EarlyBird registration will be announced   in December.