Ouch

Ouch!  You probably have used this word to express sudden pain. It may be an involuntary response but studies suggest that this kind of vocalization helps distract you from the pain.

Ouch is an interjection, a word that shows a sudden outburst of emotion or excitement. You usually find them at the start of a sentence, or all alone with an exclamation mark. Wow!

"Ouch" is not universal. Other languages use other interjections. Do you know one? Post it in a comment below.

"Ouch" is an Americanism that comes from Middle English ouche (noun), from nouche , Old French nosche and German autsch.

I couldn't pin down its first known use in English, but it is at least earlier than the 20th century.

It is interesting that researchers found that saying “ow” (a more modern interjection interchangeable with "ouch") during the experiment increased the subjects’ tolerance for pain. But hearing a recording of their own voice or someone else’s voice saying “ow” did not help at all. An earlier study found that swearing is also an effective way to increase pain tolerance.

Though I had never encountered other usages, I found that OUCH can mean as a noun a clasp, buckle, or brooch, especially one worn for ornament, or the setting of a precious stone, and as a verb (used with object) meaning to adorn with or as if with ouches.

Titles in Literature

In this next installment of the origins of some book titles, we look at three classic pieces of literature.

Look Homeward, Angel is Thomas Wolfe's first novel.

Thomas' father, William Oliver Wolfe, use an angel statue as a porch advertisement at the family monument shop in Asheville, North Carolina. He sold the statue to a family who placed it in the Hendersonville Oakdale Cemetery. That statue, combined with a line from John Milton's poem "Lycidas" gave him his title.

"Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth:
And, O ye Dolphins, waft the hapless youth."

Wolfe's original title was The Building of a Wall, which he later changed to O Lost.  Good choice.


Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the play by Edward Albee (and later a film) explained how he found his title in the bathroom of a saloon in Greenwich Village in 1954.

“I was in there having a beer one night, and I saw ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ scrawled in soap, I suppose, on this mirror. When I started to write the play it cropped up in my mind again. And of course, who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf means who’s afraid of the big bad wolf... who’s afraid of living life without false illusions. And it did strike me as being a rather typical, university intellectual joke.”

John Steinbeck’s working title for a short novel was Something That Happened. But he changed his mind after reading Robert Burns’s poem “To a Mouse,” and latching onto the lines “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft agley” (“The best-laid plans of mice and men / Often go awry”). The new title certainly gives us more about what Of Mice and Men is about.



James Joyce's Ulysses is one of those books you might be assigned to read, and it is on that list of "books you should read." And it is rarely read all the way through by most people who start it.

Books of 800 pages intimidated me as an English major and still do today. I struggle through it and wrote a paper about it. these many decades later, I recall very little of it. I do recall thinking "Why title it Ulysses?’" The name shows up a few times (once it is Ulysses Grant) but it hardly seems relevant.

Of course, I knew it might have something to do with that earlier un-Latinised Ulysses, Odysseus, the hero of Homer's Odyssey. I needed a professor to reveal that Joyce had used an intricate (and personal) allegory of the Odyssey to build his book in 18 episodes. Each had its own style and he gave them each an Odyssean name. But he didn't give readers the names in the text. The episodes are ‘Telemachus’, ‘Nestor’, ‘Proteus’, ‘Calypso’, ‘Lotus Eaters’ etc.  Joyce's Molly Bloom is like Penelope, and Stephen Dedalus is like Telemachus.

Radar and Microwave Ovens

RADAR was coined in 1940 by the United States Navy as an acronym for RAdio Detection And Ranging (or RAdio Direction And Ranging). The term radar has since been used in English and other languages as a common noun, losing all capitalization.

Radar is a technology based on the principle that radio waves can bounce off the surfaces of large objects. A radio wave beam pointed in one direction will bounce back at the source if they encounter an obstruction in their path. For radar detection, measuring the bounced-back radio waves can indicate distant objects or objects hidden from view by clouds or fog can be detected. Radar was used to detect planes and ships, and later weather patterns since rainstorms also caused interference that could be measured.

But what does that have to do with microwave ovens? Amana, a subsidiary of Raytheon corporation, called their first model the “Radarange” (radar + range, as in stove). Do microwave ovens use radar?

During World War II, the American military needed more magnetrons for radar installations, and Raytheon was given the assignment. By redesigning the magnetron so that components could be punched out from sheet metal, mass production of magnetrons was increased dramatically.

When an engineer was working with a live magnetron, he noticed that a candy bar in his pocket had started to melt. He thought that the radio waves from the magnetron caused the heating. After further testing, including popping corn, Raytheon filed for a patent for using radar technology for cooking. An oven using radar technology was made.

Though microwaves has been used for commercial food preparation since the 1950s, 2017 marks the 50th anniversary of the first Amana ovens sold for home use in 1967.