THE FASCINATION OF WORDS

Shannon News, 4 December 1925, Page 3

THE FASCINATION OF WORDS

What is more fascinating than a word? To show what I mean (says "P.R.," in the "Daily Chronicle"), I was searching for a four.letter word "meaning nothing." What my occupa. tion was at that moment scarcely needs describing in this day of "horizontals" and "verticals." J At first I was baffled .. "meaning nothing." . Who could be expected to find a word meaning nothing? And then suddenly, as such things have a habit of doing ,4m idea came, out ol the blue. Cipher! No, not cipher; that has six letters. The dictionary, tha\ best seller of the present day, was produced. A synonym for cipher? How simple! "Zero," of course. It was then that I became lost to cross„word puzzles and, for the time being, to the Zero, 1 read, was not only the same thing as a cipher, but was actually manufactured from it_- Z ero was born out of the side of cipher, as it twere, lil% Eve from Adam's rib. This is how it came about. Zero is simply a contraction of the Italian word "zefiro," which is a cousin of the old French "cyfre," which in turn was derived—no doubt, by Medit. erranean traders—from the Arabic word for zero, "cifr," which originally meant empty. So there you have in brief- not only a bit of interesting information but a whole fascinating his. tory. Here is the word "write." How marly wielders of the pen know how that troublesome word .came into being? It is a descendant of the old English 'Svritan," which is from the E am e root as the German "reisscn," meaning to tear. Originally, however, it mean to* cut or score.

Immediately a flood °f . l! S ht P° urs in. Those low.browed ancestors #f ours, who lived at. the dim beginnings of human history, left on th e walls of caves or on the sides of bones a few rough but telling pictures cut in outline with some sharp instrument. This was their "writing," just as their heiroglyphs deeply etched in stone were the "writing" (of the ancient Egyptians. Then there is the word "Yankee.' How many know that it was created by the vain effort of North American Indians to pronounce English?" The best they could do was to say "yen. gees,'' which by imperceptible degrees became the word which to„day we apply to all the nasal.twanged 100 per centers who inhabit. New England. We wander among tbe "w's" and encounter the word "wicket" Surely that can be nothing less than pure Baxon in origin. On the contrary, it cam c into being, we are told, as a result of the Anglian attempt to pro. nouncc the French word "guichet," If you have been in France you will remember in railway stations the tiny ticket windows guarded by a grille of upright bars of brass. Instantly the kinship to our cricket stumps becomes apparent. Let. us turn over the pages at ran. dom until our eye alights on the word "husband." The first, syllable, we learn, is simply th o Old English word for house, which is closely related in form and pronunciation to the Dutch I word "huis." The second syllable Is probaby derived from the Old English "bindan," to bind. So a husband ia a "housebindcr" —the man whose earnings keep the home together. Tn. appreciative wives might well ponder over this little history of a muchabused term.