Nice Silly Girl!

A Way with Words is an informative and entertaining program/podcast, that explores word and language curiosities. Here is what I learned yesterday:

The word silly didn’t always have its modern meaning. In the 1400s, silly meant happy or blessed. Eventually, "silly" came to mean weak or in need of protection. Other seemingly simple words have shifted meanings as the English language developed: the term girl used to denote either a boy or a girl, and the word nice at one time meant ignorant.

Some Language Links of Interest

1. How language affects math:

In English, we say fourteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen, so one might expect that we would also say oneteen, twoteen, threeteen, and fiveteen. But we don’t. We use a different form: eleven, twelve, thirteen and fifteen. Similarly, we have forty and sixty, which sound like the words they are related to (four and six). But we also say twenty, thirty and fifty, which only sort of sound like two and three and five. And for that matter, for numbers above twenty, we put the ‘decade’ first and the unit number second (twenty-one, twenty-two) whereas for the teens, we do it the other way around (fourteen, seventeen, and eighteen). The number system in English is clearly highly irregular.

2. Acronyms and Initialisms: I whiled away a good hour on the wikipedia page. AIDS and SONAR are acronyms (pronounced as one word), while FBI and USA (pronounced as individual letters) are initialisms. Things are sometimes not as clearcut. What about MS-DOS and MPEG? And what about things like FAQ, SAT, and GRE, which are can be used either way.

3. Some tips on good grammar.