pen and pencil

Montblanc Marc Newson Ballpoint Pen

I would have guessed that "pen" and "pencil" would have the same origin story, but they do not.

PEN goes back to the late 13th century as penne and was a writing implement made from the hard, hollow stem at the base of a feather. In Old French pene was a quill pen or feather which goes back to the Latin penna "a feather, plume." 

You may also know penne as the type of pasta with cylinder-shaped pieces, their ends cut at a bias. Penne is the plural form of the Italian penna (meaning feather but also the writing pen) which also goes back to the Latin penna and is a cognate of the English word pen.

The sense and word was extended to any instrument of similar form used for writing by used a fluid ink. Pen-and-ink as an adjective meaning "made or done with a pen and ink" is attested from 1670s.

Sticks of pure graphite (AKA black lead) were used for marking things in England from the mid-16th century and later in the century the wooden enclosure for the graphite was added to protect the graphite and the hand of the writer.

The word "pencil" came from Old French pincel, from Latin penicillus meaning a "little tail." These early pencils were made as an artist's fine brush of camel hair which could make a fine line and could make letters. They were used art and also for writing before modern lead or chalk pencils. The stylus, a thin metal stick used for scratching in papyrus or wax tablets, was used by the Romans and for palm-leaf manuscripts.

Also during the 16th century, the word pencil was transferred from meaning a type of fine brush to a graphite writing implement. 

In the 19th century, the clay-graphite mix was developed and so was the mass-production. c. Hymen L. Lipman of Philadelphia obtained a patent for the pencil with an attached eraser in 1858. The pencil-sharpener as a mechanical device for putting the point on a lead pencil arrived in 1854.

By extension, the term "pen name" appears in the mid-1800s as being a fictitious name assumed by an author. Earlier, the French nom de plume had been used in English to mean the same thing.

Some other uses that are not in common usage today are "pen-gossip" meaning to gossip by correspondence; a "pencil-pusher" was a derogatory term used to describe a low-level office worker along with "pen-driver" for a clerk. The term "pencil neck" came into use briefly around 1973 to mean a weak person. 

Trivia

Trivial Pursuit game card

It is odd that "trivia" is information and data that are considered to be of "little value." It wasn't always that way.

In ancient Rome, the trivia (singular trivium) are grammar, logic, and rhetoric, which were considered to be the topics of basic education. They provided the foundation for the quadrivia of higher education.

So why was this information demoted? 

Romans used triviae to describe where one road split or forked into two roads (tri = three) + viae = roads) and became a term for a public place or a common place. (Trivia was also, in Roman mythology, the goddess who haunted crossroads, graveyards, and was the goddess of sorcery and witchcraft.)

Trivia meaning "trite, commonplace, unimportant, slight" occurs from the late 16th century, and appears in the works of Shakespeare. It may be that the lower levels of the educational curriculum were seen as less important than those of higher education.

Trivia as a kind of game or amusement began to appear in books and newspapers in the early 20th century and the board game Trivial Pursuit was released in 1982 and became popular. Trivia nights also became a popular pub game and competition.

The questions asked in that game and those competitions are often not what I would consider "trivial" or of little value. To know who was President Eisenhower's Vice-President is not on the same level as knowing what the name of Eisenhower's pet dog at the White House. (Richard Nixon and Heidi in case it comes up in a trivia game).

Much of what is considered trivial these days seems to me to be of some value, but with the overload of information presented to us, more and more of it is demoted to a place of lesser value.

Some "B" Band Name Origins

Here are some quick takes on some band name origins that start with the letter "B."

Some band names are very simple to explain. Such is the case with the band BON JOVI which is simply named after the New Jersey bandleader, Jon Bon Jovi - with the caveat that his real name is John Bongiovi, Jr., but the band name went with a name less likely to be mispronounced or misspelled. 

BLACK UHURU - Uhuru is Swahili for freedom, therefore "Black Freedom".

BLIND MELON's name has two origin stories. The term was slang for an out-of-work hippie type and supposedly member Shannon H's dad called him/them that. But the name also recalls a genuine old blues singer, Blind Lemon Jefferson, if you note that "Melon" is also an anagram for "Lemon."

The band BLINK 182 supposedly has no origin story or meaning but the band seems to encourage various origin stories. One such story is that the band started out as just Blink but was threatened by a lawsuit from an Irish band with the same name. They added the 182 and chose the number because that how many times the f-word is said in one of the member's favorite movies.

THE BLOODHOUND GANG - was a segment on the PBS kid's show 3-2-1 Contact! in the 1980's. In the show, three kids are amateur detectives, solving mysteries and fighting crime.

If the band BLOTTO's website is to be believed, the band started as the Star Spangled Washboard Band. They were a bluegrass band that did some novelty songs in their show. They had some hits including "I Get a Charge Out of You" and the medley "The Battle of New Orleans / Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor" toured and appeared in TV talk shows. 

When they disbanded, four members kept at it, added a bass player, a drummer and a female vocalist, and renamed their band Blotto. They say the name comes from the dog in the 1930's novel Nightlife of the Gods but "blotto" is also popular slang for being totally drunk.

BOOKER T. & THE M.G.'S seems like a logical name for this

Booker T. is the keyboardist and bandleader. I originally though the M.G. cmae from the once-polar sports car but it actually stands for "Memphis Group" which tells you something about the bands's origin.

Their 1962 hit, "Green Onions," has appeared in many TV shows and movies and still gets classic radio airplay.

Meliorism

I discovered "meliorism" via Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day podcast. It's a word that I think we need right now as we are in the second half of what may well be a full pandemic year.

Meliorism (MEE-lee-uh-riz-um) is the belief that the world tends to improve and that humans can aid its betterment. 

It is not pessimism and not optimism but some place in between though closer to the optimistic side.

"An old truism holds that the pessimist sees the glass as half-empty 

while the optimist sees it as half-full. But active and engaged people 

don't bother to measure the contents of their cups. They savor what they've got, 

drink it down, then go looking for a refill. One name for this approach is meliorism. 

Meliorists want to make things better—to ameliorate them."

 — Andrew Fiala, The Fresno (California) Bee, 10 Nov. 2017 

Somehow I missed this word, though it's not new. British novelist George Eliot believed she had coined meliorist back in 1877 when she wrote, "I don't know that I ever heard anybody use the word 'meliorist' except myself." But the podcast sais that there is evidence that meliorist had been around decades before Ms. Eliot used it.

It probably comes from the Latin melior, meaning "better" with a nod the English melior descendant, meliorate, a synonym of ameliorate which means "to make better or more tolerable" which was introduced to English in the 1500s.

Meliorism is a word for 2021 when I would love to believe that the world will improve and that we can aid its betterment. 

First Known Use of a Word

In researching words and names for this site, I am often looking for the first known use of a word in English. I recently found an interesting online tool called Time Traveler that allows you to enter a year and see the words first recorded in that year. The site is part of Merriam-Webster.com so these results are based on their dictionaries.

I took a look at words from 1953 and was surprised that some words only appeared that year and that some came that early in history. The list is a kind of lens on what was happening in that year.

Here are a few words that had their first known use in 1953.

• ballpoint pen
• bench press
• blacklight 
• cherry bomb
• flea collar main manmalathion
• male-pattern baldness
• Medicare
• random-access memory
• real-time
• rebar
• RSVP
• saber saw 
• stiletto heels
• sunblock
• trans-fatty acid
• UFO
• videotape and videotape recorder
• wax museum
• whoopee cushion

With each word or phrase, you can look at the origin. For example, with "UFO" you find:
UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECT
"All right." The President sighed. "Is there anybody around this table who thinks UFOs and this signal from Vega have anything to do with each other?"  — Carl Sagan
In 1966, the first UFO "abduction" was described in journalist John G. Fuller's book The Interrupted Journey.  — Keay Davidson

First Known Use of UFO, 1953, in the meaning defined above

The site cautions that the date may not represent the very oldest sense of the word. 

Many obsolete, archaic, and uncommon senses have been excluded from this dictionary, and such senses have not been taken into consideration in determining the date.

The date most often does not mark the very first time that the word was used in English. Many words were in spoken use for decades or even longer before they passed into the written language. The date is for the earliest written or printed use that the editors have been able to discover.

These dates also change as evidence of still earlier use emerges.

The First Known Use Date will appear in one of three rounded off styles:
For the Old English period (700-1099), "before 12th century"
For the Middle English period (1100-1499), by century (e.g., "14th century")
For the Modern English period (1500-present), by year (for example, "1942")