Beastie Boys

Beastie Boys, Club Citta Kawasaki, Japan, Check Your Head  tour, 1992 - via Wikimedia

The BEASTIE BOYS are another band that has played games with their name origin. Some bands (like Imagine Dragons) say their name is an anagram. Others have said their name is actually an abbreviation or acronym with each letter standing for some word.

Such is the case with BEASTIE BOYS who, according to Michael Diamond, is an acronym with BEASTIE stands for Boys Entering Anarchistic Stages Towards Internal Excellence. Of course, that means the "boys" part is repeated.

Beastie Boys were an American rap rock group from New York City, formed in 1978. The original lineup was Michael "Mike D" Diamond (vocals, drums), Adam "MCA" Yauch (vocals, bass), and Adam "Ad-Rock" Horovitz (vocals, guitar, programming). The band formed with members of a hardcore punk band called the Young Aborigines in 1978. When that band's bass player left and Yauch joined in, the band changed their name to Beastie Boys.

On a 2007 Charlie Rose TV show interview, both Yauch and Diamond acknowledged that the acronym, in fact, was an "afterthought", conceived after the band name was already chosen.

Yauch died from cancer at the age of 47 in 2012. In 2014, Mike D confirmed that he and Ad-Rock would not make music under the Beastie Boys name again. Founding Beastie Boys guitarist John Berry died in 2016, aged 52, as a result of frontotemporal dementia. He is usually credited with naming the band Beastie Boys just because it sounded cool. He played guitar on the first EP and the first Beastie Boys "show" took place at Berry's loft.

   

Is It Autumn or Fall?

Autumn by Dietmar Rabich (Derivative work: Sting), CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

It has felt like winter here in New Jersey for weeks although the winter solstice made it official today (December 21). As trees have lost their color and their leaves and then were hit with killing frosts and ice. As we enter winter, I asked myself today why the autumn season is sometimes called "fall." Is it just because leaves fall from trees?

The word autumn is derived from Latin autumnus, with connotations of the passing of the year. After the Greek era, the word continued to be used as the Old French word autompne (automne in modern French) or autumpne in Middle English,[18] and was later normalised to the original Latin. 

There are rare examples of its use as early as the 12th century, but by the 16th century, it was in common use. Before the 16th century, "harvest" was the term usually used to refer to the season, as it is common in other West Germanic languages to this day (cf. Dutch herfst, German Herbst and Scots hairst). 

A change occurred as the majority of people moved from working the land to living in towns. The harvest itself was removed from their daily life and came to refer more to the time of year rather than the activity of reaping crops.

The alternative word for the season,"fall," also has roots in old Germanic languages. The exact derivation is unclear. Possibilities include the Old English fiæll or feallan and the Old Norse fall. They seem like good origins but these words mean "to fall from a height" and not seasons or times of the year. 

The most likely explanation is that the term derived in 16th-century England as a contraction of Middle English expressions like "fall of the leaf" and "fall of the year".

With the peak of 17th century English emigration to the British colonies in North America, "fall" as a season was popularized though it was gradually becoming nearly obsolete in Britain.

ZZ Top

Poster from a film about the band

ZZ Top is an American rock band from Houston, Texas, formed in 1969. The group consists of founder Billy Gibbons (guitar, lead vocals), Dusty Hill (bass, vocals), and Frank Beard (drums, percussion). 

They were initially a blues band but their style evolved into a more rock style while maintaining Gibbons' blues guitar and Hill and Beard's rhythm section. 

We have 4 possible origin stories of how ZZ TOP may have gotten their name.

First is that they took their name from the names of other bluesmen. Gibbons noticed that some performers they admired used initials. Gibbons particularly liked B.B. King and Z. Z. Hill and thought of combining the two into "ZZ King."

A second popular story online is that they got their name by combining the names Zig Zag and Top, two well-known brands of "cigarette" rolling papers. This explanation is the only one that explains both parts of the name.

   

According to Casey Kasem's American Top 40 radio show, they chose the name because they wanted to be listed last alphabetically in names of bands and in record stores racks. I thought bands wanted to be listed first?

And a fourth origin story is that the ZZ is what you see in the boards of two classic American barn doors when they are closed. This seems unlikely - and the barns near me have X X on the doors.


ZZ Top - Greatest Hits
Tres Hombres
Rancho Texicano: The Very Best of ZZ Top

The Complete Studio Albums (10CDs) 
Double Down Live DVD
Fandango!
ZZ Top's First Album
Rio Grande Mud
ZZ Top: Live from Texas [Blu-ray DVD] 
Afterburner
The Best of ZZ Top: A Step-by-Step Breakdown of the Guitar Styles and Techniques of Billy Gibbons (Signature Licks Guitar)

   

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.