rubric

The word rubric has at least four applications:
a heading on a document.
a direction in a liturgical book as to how a church service should be conducted.
a statement of purpose or function

The application I see and use most often is an academic usage: a guide listing specific criteria for grading or scoring academic papers, projects, or tests.

The word rubric has origins in late Middle English rubrish which was the original way to refer to a heading, section of text. Earlier Old French rubriche had the same meaning and came from the Latin rubrica (terra, red clay or ink as in the red ocher/ochre color).

Medieval printers had few ways to give emphasis to text on headings and the first character of a paragraph. Illuminated manuscripts could be quite elaborate and beautiful, but fonts were not standardized and there was no italic or bold.  That left them to use color.

Ochre is a naturally occurring pigment from certain clay deposits containing iron oxides, used since prehistoric times to give color to dyes, paints and inks. Ochre colors are yellow, brown, red and purple. The most common in printing colored text was red ochre. In Latin, red ochre is rubrica and that is the origin of the word rubric as these red emphasized headings. (Scholars who penned manuscripts in red ink were known as rubricians.)

Take this a bit further in the many religious texts that were reproduced. Those texts, used by clergy, included a kind of "stage directions" for the clergy reading. These were printed in red while the text for the congregation was printed in black ink. This gave an additional meaning to the red rubric writing as instructional text.

As universities are created and books become more commonly used, scholars grading student papers would use red ink to leave instructions, suggestions and corrections on student papers. The practice has survived, although in some educational settings it is frowned on.

kill (body of water)

Looking across the Arthur Kill from Perth Amboy, NJ to Harbortown, NY

I was reading an article about my home area of New York / New Jersey and it alluded to a body of water known as the Arthur Kill. I've seen the term before and never really questioned it, knowing it as simply some kind of waterway.

A kill is similar to a creek. The word comes from the Middle Dutch kille, meaning "riverbed" or "water channel". It is logical then that we find the term used in areas of Dutch influence.

You will find it used to describe waterways in the Delaware and Hudson Valleys and other areas of the former New Netherland colony of Dutch America. Beside the Arthur Kill (separating NJ from NY's Staten Island), you find the Kill Van Kull, Dutch Kills and English Kills off Newtown Creek, Bronx Kill between the Bronx and Randalls Island.

It also shows up in names of rivers - the Wallkill River in New York and New Jersey and the Schuylkill River in Pennsylvania, and in Delaware the spooky-sounding Murderkill River, the Broadkill River, and a river made for a mystery story, the Whorekill River.

The word can't quite escape its English murder and death  association. For example, beside the Arthur Kill is a place known as the "Graveyard of Ships."

The Fresh Kills waterway goes to what was formerly the Fresh Kills landfill. Twenty years ago, it had the dubious honor of being the largest landfill in the world.

The term "kill" is also used in some geographic places and towns: the Catskill Mountains, the city of Peekskill, the town of Fishkill, New York, and the hamlet of Wynantskill, New York.

Arthur Kill area - NJ to the left

The Funny Bone

Ever hit your "funny bone"? It's not funny. It hurts.

And it's not a bone either.

What is known as the funny bone is actually a nerve - the ulnar nerve - that runs from your neck all the way to the hand. Commonly, people will whack their elbow on something and the pain will radiate along that path right down to your pinkie and ring finger.

Our nerves are shielded in most cases by bones, muscles and/or ligaments. That is true of the ulnar too EXCEPT at the point where it passes the elbow through a channel called the cubital tunnel. The only protection there is skin and fat, so it is quite vulnerable.

A decent bump there on the corner of some furniture hits the nerve against bone and sends some pain down the forearm and hand.

So, why call it a "funny bone"?

There seems to be a two-part answer. The ulnar nerve runs along a bone called the humerus (homonym for "humorous") and at one time it may have been believed that it was that bone that was reacting.

It might also be that "funny" was used in its non-humorous sense of "odd" as in having a funny feeling about something.

American Indian Place Names

Many places throughout the United States of America take their names from the languages of the indigenous Native American/American Indian tribes that first lived there. Settlements, geographic features, and later towns often took the Indian name - or more often, an Anglicized or misspelled version of it.

In my own home state of New Jersey, there are many places that take names from the Delaware, Lenape and other tribal names that were recorded.

Some places just sound strange enough that you would guess they were not English.

Ho-Ho-Kus, pronounced ho-HO-kus, is a borough located in Bergen County first settled in 1698. The meaning behind the town name is unclear. Origin stories vary but on the borough's own website, the most accepted origin is that Ho-Ho-Kus was a contraction of Mehokhokus or Mah-Ho-Ho-Kus, a native Delaware Indian term meaning “the Red Cedar,” as many older native terms beginning in “me” or “mah” lost their first syllables over time. The word is also a native term for running water, is similar to the word “hoccus” meaning fox and sounds similar to “Chihohokies,” the name of a native tribe whose chief lived in the area.

A few other examples:

Cinnaminson: Derived from the Lenni-Lenape word “senamensing” meaning “sweet water.”
Moonachie: Legend is that Moonachie was named after Chief Monaghie, a member of the Iroquois who inhabited the local cedar forests.

Hackensack: Derived from Lenni-Lenape word “Achsinnigeu-haki” meaning “stony ground.”

Paramus: The Lenape language word for the area, Peremessing, meant that it had an abundant population of wild turkey, was anglicized to become the word "Paramus"

Metuchen: Named for the Raritan Indian Chief, Matouchin, who lived in the area in the late 17th century.

Port, Starboard and sailing terms

Stern-mounted steering oar of a Roman Rhine Boat, 1st century AD

I was looking up some terms that are used in sailing but also used in common speech. Most landlubbers know bow and aft as the front and back of a boat. I was looking at the term tacking - as in taking a new tack on an issue. Tacking (or coming about) is a sailing maneuver by which a sailing vessel (which is sailing approximately into the wind) turns its bow into the wind so that the direction from which the wind blows changes from one side to the other.

That term led me to search for a few other sailing terms including the commonly heard port and starboard. Most people know they mean left and right respectively, but what is the origin of these terms.

Both are very old terms. Starboard comes from early boating even before ships had rudders. (Sidenote: rudder itself comes from Old English rōther ‘paddle, oar’ and Dutch roer, as well as the German ruder.) They were steered by use of a specialized steering oar. The oarsman was generally right-handed sailors and so the oar was on the right side. The word itself comes from Old English steorbord, literally meaning the side on which the ship is steered.

The earlier form of "port" in nautical use is larboard, from Middle-English ladebord and earlier in Old English as bæcbord. The origin of lade seems less determined but it is generally connected with the verb lade (to load) because it referred to the side on which cargo was loaded. I have read that the term larboard could be too easily misheard on the high seas as starboard and so port replaced it. It seem logical because port matches the practice of sailors mooring ships on the left side at ports in order to prevent the steering oar from being crushed.