smokin' Indo

Indo–European roots!  Can I get an amen??*

For all of us who get a kick out of etymology (all two of us), few things can be quite so titillating as The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, available for free on Bartleby.com.  (The only real competition is grammarsluts.com, where the hottest girls will never say no to your predicate nominative.**)

What makes this dictionary so great is that it has not only etymology but also Indo–European roots—sort of an über-etymology, going way back.  Latin or Greek is far enough back*** to delight us with such neato-keano surprises as apocalpyse and revelation's meaning pretty much exactly the same thing, but you gotta hit that Indo for the really out-there unveilings.

Let's say you're curious about the word ingenious (which of course you already know is not synonymous with genius).  Check that American Heritage on Bartleby, and you'll learn that ingenious descends from gen [with an upside-down e at the end of it] (no surprise so far) and that its cousins include not only words like generate, genocide, genital, and, yes, genius (again, not so surprising) but also a motley crew including general, engine, indigenous, gonad, kin–king–kind (Hamlet knew, clearly), Kriss Kringle(?), benign and malign, pregnant, nation, naïve, nature, Noël, puny...??  Who knew kings and Christmas were so close to gonads?

Another quick one.  Looked up egg, right?****  OK, so no surprise that it would have something to do with ovum, ovary, etc., but what you find out when you check out that root (awi-) is that (and this is sort of obvious once you think of it) human beings didn't used to know***** that women had eggs inside of them (remember the hilarious homunculus theories), so ovum and ovary come from bird eggs, not the other way around, and in fact the common root means bird!  That awi- is the great-great-grandpappy to words like avian, aviary, ostrich...  And this is the kind of shit I really love: auspice, an omen, which of course people back in the day used to figure out from watching birds, yo!  Never put auspice next to osprey before, I betcha!  A fish-eating hawk!  Bodes well for our journey!  Awwww yeah!!

Once you learn the egg–bird identification, you won't be as baffled by a word like caviar (avi, fish eggs), and you will be tickled (synonymous with titillated) to realize that an oval is a shape like a bird egg...

Damn, I am wearing myself out with all this excitement!

* Holy crap—they've got Semitic roots, too?  Can I get a hell yeah??

** Nobody owns grammarsluts.com!  Somebody snap up that shit up fast!

*** Grammar sluts know how to conjugate a verb with a rock-hard this-or-that subject.

**** One problem with Bartleby: it doesn't search too hot, so you enter in egg and the word egg is the fuckin' sixteenth result.  (#1 is Easter egg.)

***** I'm none too comfortable with "didn't used to," but reportedly it is the way...and of course the way that can be said comfortably is not the eternal way.