Alice in Chains

Alice in Chains (abbreviated as AIC) is an American rock band from Seattle, Washington. It was formed in 1987 by guitarist and vocalist Jerry Cantrell and drummer Sean Kinney, who later recruited bassist Mike Starr and lead vocalist Layne Staley. They are associated with grunge music, although they also can be considered as heavy metal.

The band took its name from Staley's earlier group. That band was a glam metal band, Alice N' Chains. That band formed in 1986 had wanted to change their name to Alice in Chains, but there were concerns that the reference to female bondage would hurt the band, so they chose to spell it as Alice N' Chains. Staley's bandmates had also briefly considered the name Alice in Wonderland but settled on the version that could be interpreted as Alice IN Chains or Alice IN Chains in its pronunciation.

One humorous but unfounded origin rumor I found was that they were named after a lost episode from The Brady Bunch series which had a major character named Alice.

       

Pseudonyms: Rappers

I have written before about pseudonyms. The use of these "stage names" is a very common practice amongst music rappers.

Here are some of the better-known ones.

The origins are sometimes obvious, sometimes not obvious. For example, Eminem began rapping at age 14 with his friend Mike Ruby using the pseudonyms "Manix" for Ruby and "M&M" for Marshall Mathers III initials.  "M&M" evolved into "Eminem."

A less obvious origin is that of "50 Cent" adopted by Curtis James Jackson III. Jackson adopted the nickname "50 Cent" as a metaphor for change. The name was used earlier by Kelvin Martin, a 1980s Brooklyn robber known as "50 Cent." Jackson said he chose it "because it says everything I want it to say. I'm the same kind of person 50 Cent was. I provide for myself by any means."

Andre 3000 ............... Andre Benjamin
Busta Rhymes ............... Trevor Smith
Cee-Lo .................. Thomas Calloway
Common .............. Lonnie Rashid Lynn
DMX ...................... Earl Simmons
Foxy Brown ............... Inga Marchand
The Game .................. Jayceon Taylor
Ghostface Killah ............. Dennis Coles
Grandmaster Flash .......... Joseph Saddler
Ice Cube .................. O’Shea Jackson
Ice-T ....................... Tracy Morrow
Ja Rule ...................... Jeffrey Atkins
Jay-Z ...................... Shawn Carter
KRS-One .....................Kris Parker
Lil’ Kim ....................Kimberly Jones
LL Cool J ............... James Todd Smith
Ludacris ............... Christopher Bridges
Mos Def .................... Dante Smith
Notorious BIG ......... Christopher Wallace
Snoop Dogg ...............Calvin Broadus
T.I......................Clifford Harris Jr.

Ad-lib

Ad-lib is one of the most common Latin phrases used in English. Ad-lib is the shortened version of "ad libitum" which is Latin for "at one's pleasure" or "as you desire." Sometimes it is translated as meaning "at liberty" simply because of that "lib" syllable, but that is not an accurate translation.

The most common use in drama when used to describe times in performance when a performer uses words not found in the text. (When the entire performance is spontaneous and unscripted it is called improvisation.) This occurs on the live stage, in films, on television and frequently in situations such as the conversations on talk-shows, news, podcasts etc.

Larry David's HBO series, Curb Your Enthusiasm, is often pointed to as an example of ad-lib drama. The show can also be said to use "retroscripting." The series also has created its own collection of words and phrases, as noted in the video shown here.

Less well known is its use as a direction in sheet music where "ad libitum" indicates that the performer or conductor has one of a variety of types of discretion with respect to a given passage.

Ad libitum is also used in psychology and biology to refer to the "free-feeding" weight of an animal when the animal eats as it wishes rather than its weight on a restricted diet.

Boilerplate

NASA engineers inspect and test a boilerplate Mercury space capsule.
Image: NASA on The Commons

You will sometimes hear material referred to as being "boilerplate."

In my own academic work, it is sometimes used to describe a general statement, such as a grading policy, used as a starting place that teachers can modify to their needs, or sometimes, it is used "as is."

I have also heard it used to describe standardized pieces of text for contracts, and as a portion of a computer program. As the illustration above shows, it can also be used to describe a non-textual object.

In newspaper publishing, before the days of digital printing. There was syndicated material supplied to smaller newspapers in a printing plate form. This was particularly true for weekly newspapers who could use these feature stories, editorials, etc. supplied by large publishing syndicates. Rather than having to set type for the story, it was delivered on metal plates with the type already in place. They were given the name "boiler plates" because they looked like the plating used in making steam boilers.

The word "boilerplate" was used to refer to the printed material on the plates as well as to the plates themselves. Boilerplate stories were often more considered "filler" than hard news, and so the the word acquired a negative connotation. Some modern dictionaries will list its meaning as including the sense of boilerplate being hackneyed, unoriginal or clichéd writing that expresses a generally accepted opinion or belief.

You will also still find it meaning the rolled steel used for making boilers. And a more specialized meaning, as used in climbing, is to describe smooth, overlapping and undercut slabs of rock.

Rx (prescription)

I found several different theories about the origin of this symbol "Rx" used by doctors before a prescription. Is it an abbreviation? Is it some ancient chemical symbol?

Several origins sound less credible. One source said that Rx is a corruption of the symbol for Jupiter and that a prayer to Jupiter would speed healing. That doesn't make sense to me since Jupiter (also known as Jove) was the god of the sky and thunder and king of the gods in Ancient Roman religion and mythology and not associated with healing.

I couldn't find a symbol for the god, but the symbol for the planet looks like an odd 4 and is said to represent an eagle, which is Jupiter's bird.

Another theory is that the Rx symbol evolved from the Eye of Horus, an ancient Egyptian symbol associated with healing powers. This has a bit more believability because pharmacy has been around for thousands of years and the first recorded prescriptions were etched on a clay tablet in Mesopotamia around 2100 B.C. There were the equivalent of drugstores in Baghdad in the eighth century A.D.

The problem is that the Eye of Horus (also known as wadjet, wedjat or udjat) though it is an ancient Egyptian symbol of protection, royal power, and good health, doesn't look like the Rx.

The most likely origin is that this symbol seen on doctor’s prescription pads and signs in pharmacies is derived from the Latin word “recipe,” meaning “take.”  The word recipe has had the same function from the 13th through the 17th centuries. The two letters were a 19th-century way of easily reproducing a 16th-century symbol - the letter R with a line through its slanted leg.
℞  that meant the "R" is functioning as an abbreviation - not an X.
It wasn't till around 1911 that "Rx" came to be used as meaning the the noun "prescription." A recipe associated with cooking came into being in the early 17th century, which is when America’s earliest drugstores came into being in big cities. The first college of pharmacy in the United States was founded in 1821 in Philadelphia.

Today in America, the centuries old mortar and pestle - tools of the trade - is often used by pharmacists as an industry symbol along with Rx.

Interrobang

The ‘interrobang’ is both an odd word and an odd piece of punctuation.

I am surely not alone in having typed or written ?! or !? at the end of a sentence to indicate that I am both puzzled and shocked.  "The President said what?!"

The interrobang (sometimes as interrabang) combines the exclamation point with a question mark. In the jargon of printers and programmers, this is called a "bang." The glyph is a superimposition of these two marks, as shown here.

The interrobang is not a standard punctuation mark. Few modern typefaces or fonts include a glyph that you can use for the interrobang character. But it can be made in some cases.

The interrobang can be used in some word processors with the alt code Alt+8253 when working in a font that supports the interrobang, or using an operating system that performs font substitution.

You can use it with some keystrokes. In Microsoft Word, try Alt + 8253. In HTML: &#8253.  The standard interrobang is at Unicode code point U+203D will produce ‽ (size increased here for clarity)

Martin K. Speckter conceptualized the interrobang in 1962 while working as the head of an advertising agency. Ge thought that advertisements would look better if copywriters conveyed surprised rhetorical questions using a single mark.

He proposed the concept of a single punctuation mark in an article in the magazine TYPEtalks and asked for suggestions for a name for the new character. Some suggestions were exclamaquest, QuizDing, rhet, and exclarotive, He chose interrobang because  interrogatio is Latin for "rhetorical question" or "cross-examination" and bang is printers' slang for the exclamation mark.

May Day, Mayday and SOS

Vulcan and Maia (1585) by Bartholomäus Spranger

First off, the month of May was named for the Greek goddess Maia, who was identified with the earlier Roman goddess of fertility, Bona Dea, whose festival was held in May.

The holiday called May Day falls on the first day of May and it is a chance to celebrate spring moving into summer. Included in the outdoor celebrations is dancing around a maypole. In Wales, this festival was connected to the May Queen (Creiddylad) and the maypole and its dance is a remnant of the old festivities.

May Day is an ancient northern hemisphere spring festival and today is a national holiday in more than 80 countries and celebrated less officially in other countries.

But May Day is not to be confused with the distress call mayday which is used primarily by aviators and mariners, but in some countries local organizations such as firefighters, police forces, and transportation organizations also use the term. This term came into English in the early 1900s. It derives from the French venez m'aider, meaning "come help me".

The call is always given three times in a row ("Mayday Mayday Mayday") to distinguish an actual Mayday call from a message about a Mayday call. (Making a false distress call in the United States is a federal crime.)

The Mayday call sign originated in 1923 with Frederick Stanley Mockford who was a radio officer at Croydon Airport in London. He thought, especially because much of the traffic at the time was between Croydon and Le Bourget Airport in Paris, that "mayday" from the French would be understood by both sides since it was taken from the French m'aider ('help me'), a shortened form of venez m'aider ('come and help me').

While ships can also  issue a mayday radio call, originally the Morse code "SOS" was the more common distress signal. "SOS" does not mean Save Our Souls or Save Our Ship as I was once told. It was adopted in 1905 by German ships for signifying distress. The British working with Marconi radio operators wanted to keep CQD (General Call Disaster though sometimes translated as Come Quick Disaster) as a distress signal.

It was first suggested to use SOE, but the small "E" dot in Morse code can easily be lost. The suggestion was then to use SOS, which was adopted at the Berlin Radiotelegraphic Convention in 1906 as the official international standard for distress calls. The first time the SOS signal was used in an emergency was on June 10, 1909 when the Cunard liner "SS Slavonia" wrecked off the Azores.

Prius (automobile)

2019 Toyota Prius 

The Toyota Prius is a full hybrid electric automobile developed by Toyota and manufactured by the company since 1997.

When Toyota was namining the world's first mass-produced hybrid vehicle, they wanted a name that would connect to it being groundbreaking and the predecessor of the cars of the future. They turned to latin and chose "prius," meaning "first," "original," or "to go before."  It is the root of our modern word "prior."

An odd controversy surrounding the name emerged when people wanted to refer to more than one of the cars. What is the correct plural form?

The two leading contenders were "Prii" and "Priuses." Toyota initially said the plural was "Prius" (like moose or deer). But in February 2011, Toyota USA asked the US public to decide on what the most proper plural form of Prius should be. The choices included Prien, Prii, Prium, Prius, or Priuses. "Prii" was the most popular choice, but it was close - “Prii” received 25% but “Prius” came in a close second with 24%.

Technically, in Latin, the plural of “Prius” is actually “Priora” or “Priores.” (Latin assigns gender to nouns. “Priores” is the feminine plural, while “Priora” would be the neuter plural form.) Priora is a brand name used for a Russian automobile, the Lada Priora in 2007.

And don't be surprised if you still hear people use "Priuses" as the plural in English.

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.

Kindle

As e-readers became mainstream, the Kindle from Amazon quickly became the frontrunner.  Amazon Kindle devices enable users to browse, buy, download, and read e-books, newspapers, magazines and other digital media via wireless networking to the Kindle Store.

A single device was launched in 2007, but Kindle now comprises a range of devices, including e-readers with E Ink electronic paper displays and Kindle applications on all major computing platforms.

The name "Kindle" comes from the idea of "kindling" a fire, in this case an intellectual fire of new ideas that could spread to readers all over the world. Amazon originally used the codename "Fiona" for this e-reader.

The product's success led to the Kindle Fire, a tablet computer developed by Amazon and first released in November 2011. That first version featured a color 7-inch multi-touch display running a custom version of Google's Android operating system called Fire OS.

Currently, the product is called simply Fire. and it incorporates Amazon's Alexa voice assistant system.

Fortune magazine reported that, "As with most of Amazon’s devices, the aim isn’t to make money off of the hardware but instead to sell digital content such as books, movies, and TV shows to users."

An Okay Story

OKay

I came across a book, OK: The Improbable Story of America's Greatest Word, that got me thinking about this common word that doesn't get much thought. Is okay (AKA OK or O.K.) America's greatest word?  Yes, according to author Allan Metcalf, English professor and executive secretary of the American Dialect Society.

OK is such a common colloquial English way of denoting approval, assent, or acknowledgment, that I also posted this on my One Page Schoolhouse website.

"Okay" has spread as a loanword to other languages.

It has shades of meanings and is used as several parts of speech: As an adjective, "It's okay to sit here" means "acceptable" but "Their food is just okay" means "mediocre" rather than being "good."

People use it as an adverb ("She sings okay.")

"Okay, I'll leave now" makes it an interjection meaning compliance and "Okay, I like that option" indicates "agreement."

You can use it was a verb, as in "The office okayed my travel expenses."

These two letters (I'm not a fan of the "O.K." version because I don't see it as an abbreviation.) are very versatile.

The OK or ring gesture is a common hand sign. It even has an online Unicode symbol (U+1F44C) and is a commonly used emoticon online 👌 . Connecting the thumb and index finger into a circle, and holding the other fingers straight or relaxed away from the palm indicates something is okay.

Divers use the sign to say that you are okay or to ask another person if they are okay.

Take note that in other contexts or cultures, this same gesture has different meanings or connotations that are not simply linguistic, including ones that are negative, offensive, financial, numerical, devotional. For example, in France the "OK" gesture bears both positive and negative connotations, and in parts of the Arab world, this sign represents the evil eye and is used as a curse.

The origin is not definitive. One version is that at a Chicago bakery named O. Kendall and Sons they stamped Army biscuits with the company initials OK, or maybe it was a Boston baker named Otto Kimmel who did that on his vanilla cookies. But why attach the meanings to it beyond it being a kind of logo?

I also found that it might be d from the Choctaw word "okeh" -which means "it is true." That sounds more sensical, though I found no path for its entry into English.

There is an origin that attaches "OK" to the Boston Morning Post back in 1839 where as an editor's joke it was used as an abbreviation for a misspelled version of the phrase "all correct." Huh? That makes no sense to me.

I prefer a New Jersey diary entry of William Richardson in 1815. He is writing about a journey from from Boston to New Orleans and writes: "Arrived at Princeton (NJ), a handsome little village, 15 miles from N Brunswick, ok at Trenton, where we dined at 1 P.M."  We assume he meant that he is giving his Trenton meal an "all right" review. But it is unlikely that Richardson invented the ok term as a personal short form, so where did he get it from and why did it spread?

We also sometimes use "A-OK" to mean a stronger form of okay. The term seem to have originated with the space program.

There is also "okie-dokie," a slang term that also means okay that was popularized in the Our Gang (The Little Rascals) films.

OK had usefulness as a short form in 19th century telegraph messages with their abbreviations that resemble our own Tweets. And if OK isn't enough of a shortening of okay, you will also see the single "K" in text messages.

NHL Team Names Part 4

In this fourth and final installment, we conclude our look at hockey team names.

Colorado fans were given eight names to choose from and Avalanche was the most popular. An avalanche is a frighteningly powerful act of nature that occurs in Colorado's mountains and their logo features a Rocky mountain-like "A" and an avalanche on a puck whips around the "A."

The Dallas Stars of Texas, honors the "Lone Star state." However, when the team was in Minnesota, their fans had chosen the Minnesota state motto "Etoile du Nord" (Star of the North).

The Detroit Red Wings name was the choice of then team president James Norris. He picked it because he had played on the Montreal Winged Wheelers and their wheel logo was a good fit for Detroit which is also known as the Motor City for its automotive production.

Edmonton Oilers - The management held a contest and chose Oilers, reflecting the importance of the oil industry in the area. They kept the name when it moved from the World Hockey Association (WHA) to the National Hockey League.

Florida Panthers - H. Wayne Huizenaga wanted to draw attention to the Panther, an endangered native wildcat of Florida.

         

Hartford Whalers - When originally in the WHA, club was named New England Whalers for two reasons: (1) New England, particularly Massachusetts, seaport towns are connected to whaling; (2) the name had WHA in it (WHAlers). Name later changed to Hartford Whalers. The original logo featured a whaling harpoon and the newer version features a stylized "H" with a whale's fluke.

         

Los Angeles Kings - Original owner, the late Jack Kent Cooke, named the team himself. The original colors were purple and gold with a logo of royal crown. The team colors became black, silver and white the same year Wayne Gretzky joined the team (1988-89). The current version features the letters "LA" and a silver crown.

Montreal Canadiens - Representing the nationality of the players on the team. Originally, the team had only French Canadian players.

And team #31 in the NHL will be in Seattle.

The nhlseattle.com team name and identity have not been decided as of this writing. Fans have been asked to help select the team name by sharing ideas using the hashtag #NHLSeattle or #ReturnToHockey.