android, automaton, gynoid, fembot

 

Actroid - by Gnsin, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

An android is a humanoid robot or other artificial beings. Typically, they are made from a flesh-like material to resemble a real person. Though the word and idea come from science fiction in print and on screens, advances in robot technology now allow the design of functional and realistic humanoid robots.

The word "android" has been used to refer to robotic humanoids regardless of apparent gender, but the Greek prefix "andr-" refers to man in the masculine sense. The word has a long usage history.

• The OED has the earliest use (as "Androides") to Ephraim Chambers' 1728 Cyclopaedia, in reference to an automaton that St. Albertus Magnus allegedly created.
• The late 1700s: androides are elaborate mechanical devices resembling humans performing human activities which were displayed in exhibit halls.
• "android" appears in US patents as early as 1863 in reference to miniature human-like toy automatons which are machines that do human actions and may or may not resemble a human. The word "automaton" is the Latinization of the Ancient Greek αὐτόματον, automaton, (neuter) meaning "acting of one's own will." The word was first used by Homer to describe automatic door opening, or automatic movement of wheeled tripods
• A distinction between mechanical robots and fleshy androids was popularized by Edmond Hamilton's Captain Future stories (1940–1944).
• Karel Čapek's robots in the play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots, 1921) introduced the word robot to the world. But "robot" has come to primarily refer to mechanical devices which also may look like humans or animals but can also be just a humanlike arm or hand that performs a task, such as assembling a vehicle. "Robotess" is the oldest female-specific term and was used by Rossum, though it was not used widely beyond his play.

The term "droid" was popularized by George Lucas in the original Star Wars film. Though it is simply an abridgment of "android", it has been used by Lucas and others to mean any robot, including distinctly non-human form machines like R2-D2. 

Another shortening, "andy", appears in Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (adapted to the screen as Blade Runner) and was a pejorative term for an android.

Newest in this line of terms is "gynoid" which actually is anything that resembles or pertains to the female human form. The term gynoid was first used by Isaac Asimov in a 1979 editorial, as a theoretical female equivalent of the word android.

But other terms have been used for feminine robots exist. The portmanteau "fembot" (feminine robot) was popularized by the television series The Bionic Woman in 1976 and used in the Austin Powers films and others to suggest a sexualized gynoid. 

An unfortunate, though not unexpected, progression in gynoids in fiction and now in actuality are that they are "eroticized." Sensitivity sensors in their breasts and genitals to facilitate sexual response comes from male desires for custom-made passive women and is compared to life-size sex dolls. 

The HBO series Westworld is a very updated version of the 1973 film, written and directed by Michael Crichton, about adult guests visiting an interactive amusement park containing lifelike androids. The androids and gynoids in the extended TV series are used for far greater violent and sexual pleasures than the original film. 

     

Velcro

Here's another generic trademark post. Did you realize that it was back in 1958 that Velcro was patented? It was invented by George de Mestral, an electrical engineer from Switzerland who applied for his first patent when he was 12 years old, for a model airplane.

While on a hunting trip, he hiked through patches of burdock, a thistly plant that spreads its spiny seeds by latching them onto anything or anyone passing by. Back home he was picking the burs off his dog’s coat and his own clothes and got curious about how they so effectively attached to surfaces.

a hook and loop fastener generically called velcro

Under a microscope, he saw that each bristle was a tiny hook that was able to catch in the loops of clothing. It took him 10 years to get his hook and loop working by being sewn to nylon. There were hundreds of loops per inch and the initial production was slow and inefficient.

That is the origin story for the product. The word's origin is the combination (a portmanteau) of the beginnings of two French words velour, meaning "velvet" and crochet meaning "hook."

Velcro BVBA is a privately held company that produces fasteners and other products. It is the original patentor of the hook-and-loop fastener. Like other companies, it is not thrilled that their original product has been attached to generic products that are called "velcro."

Wikipedia

Wikipedia has become the place to go online to start your search for information about - well, just about anything. With its launch in 2001 as an online, editable English-language encyclopedia, it quickly captured a user base and thousands of editors who monitor the articles.

Versions in other languages were quickly developed, but the with more than 6 million articles, the English Wikipedia is the largest of the more than 290 Wikipedia encyclopedias. The numbers keep growing, but Wikipedia comprises more than 40 million articles in 301 different languages. It is one of the top 5 websites visited in the world.

Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Sanger was the one who coined its name. It is a portmanteau of "wiki" and "pedia" from encyclopedia. But what are the origins of those two words? 

According to Wikipedia:

"The word encyclopedia comes from the Koine Greek ἐγκύκλιος παιδεία,^[8] transliterated enkyklios paideia, meaning "general education" from enkyklios (ἐγκύκλιος), meaning "circular, recurrent, required regularly, general"^[9] and paideia (παιδεία), meaning "education, rearing of a child"; together, the phrase literally translates as "complete instruction" or "complete knowledge".^[10]However, the two separate words were reduced to a single word due to a scribal error^[11] by copyists of a Latin manuscript edition of Quintillian in 1470.^[12] The copyists took this phrase to be a single Greek word, enkyklopaidia, with the same meaning, and this spurious Greek word became the New Latin word "encyclopaedia", which in turn came into English."

The -pedia part is pretty obvious, but wiki is less obvious. Wikis existed before Wikipedia and the word is still used to describe websites with content that is specifically designed to be edited by its users. "Wiki" was first used by Ward Cunningham to describe software he wrote in 1994 that was meant to speed up the communication process between computer programmers.

Cunningham borrowed the word from the Hawaiian language, where it means "fast," after he heard it in the Honolulu airport when an employee told him to take the "Wiki Wiki Shuttle" between terminals.

An erroneous etymology is that wiki is an acronym for "What I Know Is." Some people applied that definition to the word later, making it a backronym.

Portmanteau

A portmanteau is a linguistic blend of words. Parts of multiple words or their phones (sounds) are combined into a new word.

An example is the word "smog" which is a blend of smoke and fog. Motor and hotel are combined to create "motel."

In fancy linguistic talk, a portmanteau is defined as a single morph that represents two or more morphemes.

A portmanteau sounds similar to the grammatical term contraction. But contractions are formed from words that sometimes already appear together in sequence. For example, we say and write "do not" but we also use the contraction "don't."

A portmanteau is also similar to a compound word such as "firetruck" or "starfish." But in a compound word does not truncate parts of the blended words but uses them whole.

English has many portmanteaus. A spork is an eating utensil that is a combination of a spoon and a fork, A skort is an item of clothing that is part skirt, part shorts. The turducken is a food product made by inserting a chicken into a duck, and the duck into a turkey. It sounds like a joke, but it is real and was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2010.

Where did the word portmanteau come from?

An illustration by John Tenniel for the poem "Jabberwocky"
by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There.

The word portmanteau was first used in the sense above by Lewis Carroll in his book Through the Looking-Glass in 1871. In the book, Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice that the unusual words in the poem "Jabberwocky" - such as "slithy" means "slimy and lithe" and "mimsy" is a blend of "miserable and flimsy". Humpty Dumpty says "You see it's like a portmanteau — there are two meanings packed up into one word."

But Carroll did not invent the word. In his time, a portmanteau was a suitcase that opened into two equal sections. The etymology of the word is the French porte-manteau, from porter, "to carry", and manteau, "cloak" (from Old French mantel, from Latin mantellum). In modern French, a porte-manteau is a clothes valet, a coat-tree or similar article of furniture for hanging up jackets, hats, umbrellas and the like.