Pogo Stick

A pogo stick is a device for jumping off the ground in a standing position, through the aid of a spring.

They can be used as a toy, exercise equipment, or extreme sports instrument. It has had peaks and valleys in its popularity. It was very popular in the late 1960s and 70s, and is enjoying some renewed popularity now in extreme sports via the new sport of extreme pogo or "Xpogo".

It consists of a pole with a handle at the top and footrests near the bottom, and a spring located somewhere along the pole. The spring joins two sections of the pole, which extends below the footpads. It can be steered by shifting one's weight off the centerline of the spring in the desired horizontal direction thus producing horizontal locomotion.

A pogo stick that was not called a pogo stick was patented in 1891 by George H. Herrington of Wichita, Kansas "for leaping great distances and heights". This was an antecedent of the pogo stick as well as today's spring stilts.

We can call the pogo stick an eponym because the modern pogo stick name supposedly comes from a redesigned version that looks like the one we know by Hans Pohlig and Ernst Gottschall whose combined names give us "PoGo." They applied for a German patent in 1920 and described their device as a "spring end hopping stilt."

Glitch

Right off, I have to say that although the term "glitch" is in common use, the origins and etymology of  it are unclear.

It has come to mean "a short-lived fault in a system." It is often used to describe a transient fault that corrects itself, and is therefore difficult to troubleshoot. The term is particularly common in the computing and electronics industries, and among players of video games.

It seems to first come into use in the late-1950s within the military and space program, but it didn't appear in the media until the early-1960s in the context of unforeseen technical errors in space travel. Astronaut John Glenn used the word in his 1962 book, Into Orbit: "Another term we adopted to describe some of our problems was 'glitch'. Literally, a glitch ... is such a minute change in voltage that no fuse could protect against it."


Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang says the term comes from the German word glitschen ("to slip") and the Yiddish word gletshn ("to slide or skid").

In 1965, Time Magazine felt the need to define it when using it in an article: "Glitches—a spaceman's word for irritating disturbances."

Glitch was used to describe a computer bug that many feared would cause an apocalyptic crisis named Y2K. The term fit in that the bang turned out to be a whimper.

On the other hand, it was also used to describe issues with the launch of the HealthCare.gov website. In that case, it is misused considering the issues were much more than just a "short-lived fault in a system that corrects itself."

Contronyms

I first came across the term contronym when I was teaching middle school English. They are words that are their own antonyms. In other words, they mean something and they mean the opposite. That can be confusing.

Take this sentence:  "The company's oversight had become a costly issue."  Did the company overlook a problem or was it that their conscientious overseeing of something was costing someone problems?

Usually, we can tell which meaning from the context.  "The carcass was cleaved" uses it to mean "to plit or sever" (as with a cleaver).  "He cleaves to his beliefs" means not a split but that he clings or adheres to them. Both meanings come from Old English, but from different, though similar words.  Cleave as to adhere comes from clifian. Cleave as in to split comes from clēofan. That word takes forms that apply to that meaning still, like "cloven," as in a type of split hoof and "cleft" as in cleft palate.

Some other contronyms:

Sanction = to give official permission or approval OR to impose a penalty on.

Left = remaining (What's left to eat?) OR departed (Everyone left the room.)

Dust = the noun is that annoying coating on furniture, but the verb is to remove that coating. Similarly, we use "seed." Seeding the lawn adds seeds but seeding a pepper is removing them.

Trim as a verb can mean adding or taking away. If you trim the Christmas tree, you add decorations. But if you trim a tree in the backyard, you are more likely to be cutting away at it.

Fast can mean "moving rapidly" (driving fast) or "fixed, unmoving" (holding fast or colors that are fast and so will not run).

Screen can mean ‘to show’ (a movie) or ‘to hide’ (an unsightly view).

Clip can mean "to bind together" (clip some papers) or "to separate" (as in clippers or clipping coupons from a newspaper).

Acronyms

I was flipping through the The American Heritage Abbreviations Dictionary of Acronyms and Abbreviations Including Cyberspeak (go ahead and laugh) and I decided it was time to add some acronyms to the site.

An acronym is an abbreviation but not an abbreviation. It is formed from the initial components in a phrase or a word BUT pronouned as a word without periods rather than as a string of letter. Usually these components are individual letters or parts of words or names.

So the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is NATO and is pronounced nay-toe rather than as N, A, T, O. and AIDS meaning Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome is a word rather than A.I.D.S.

There is some consensus but no universal standardization of various names for such abbreviations and of their orthographic styling. In English, they are much more common in the 20th century. any products and organizations deliberately create names so that the result is able to be pronounced as a word.

ASAP is pronounced A- SAP and stands for As Soon As Possible. It was often used in the military and in hospitals.

AWOL, Absent Without Official Leave, is a common acronym that has gone beyond its original military meaning. Nowadays, we use the acronym to mean that someone has gone missing without letting anyone know why and possibly without "permission."  (Not to be confused with the military abbreviation MIA for "missing in action" which is often what we mean when we say someone’s gone “AWOL.”

Sometimes acronyms go into such common usage that the original words represented by the letters are forgotten and the capitalized letters are printed in lowercase. Here are some common examples of that.

LASER - Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation - is treated as a word rather than an acronym.

RADAR = Radio Detection And Ranging.

SCUBA = Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus

SWAT = Special Weapons And Tactics, as in those SWAT teams of police, FBI or military that we see on TV and in films.

Mr. ZIP promoted the use of ZIP codes for the USPS during the 1960s and 1970s.

In the U.K. and Australia, there are postcodes and in Canada, postal codes. In the U.S., we had a zone system. I grew up in a part of New Jersey and I lived in Zone 11. Eventually, the zones were too populous to be useful for addressses and the postal service. For efficiency, a  Zone Improvement Plan was put in place as the U.S. Postal Service’s scheme for improving their mail delivery codes. Zipping the speed of mail delivery gave us Zip Codes that narrowed down the location.

Since 1963, the term ZIP, has suggested that the mail travels more efficiently, and therefore more quickly (zipping along), when senders use the code in the postal address. The basic format consists of five decimal numerical digits. An extended ZIP+4 code, introduced in 1983, includes the five digits of the ZIP code, a hyphen, and four additional digits that determine a more specific location within a given ZIP code. The USPS provides a free online lookup tool for ZIP codes at www.usps.com/zip4/.

As with many acronyms, usage rules have evolved. The term ZIP code was originally registered as a servicemark (a type of trademark) by the U.S. Postal Service, but its registration has since expired. The original USPS style for ZIP is all caps, although style sheets for some publications use sentence case or lowercase now.

San Diego Padres

There was a minor league team called the San Diego Padres of the Pacific Coast League that was in operation from 1936-1968. When Major League Baseball expanded to San Diego in 1969, the old nickname was retained for the new San Diego Padres.

That minor league franchise won the PCL title in 1937, led by 18-year-old Ted Williams, the future Hall-of-Famer who was a native of San Diego.

Though it has no sports connection, the name Padre was taken from the Spanish word for "Father", a term of respect used for Spanish missionaries. Padres refers to the Spanish Franciscan friars who founded San Diego in 1769.

logo 1985

The team is frequently called the "Pads" or "Pods" in the media, which rhymes with the first syllable of "PAHD-rays". "Friars" has also been a longtime team nickname.