Hygge and Hugs

Hygge (pronounced hue-guh) is a Danish word used to mean something is cozy, comfortable, and charming. This coziness philosophy became the topic of a bunch of lifestyle books and blogs the past few years.

Hygge values the idea of cherishing yourself, candlelight, bakeries, a warming fireplace, dinner with friends, values experiences over possessions, and treasuring a sense of community.

The word hygge comes from a Norwegian word meaning "wellbeing, it is also said that it might originate from the word hug. Hug comes from the 1560s word hugge, which means "to embrace". The word hugge is of unknown origin but is highly associated with an Old Norse term, hygga, which means "to comfort", which in turn comes from the word hugr, meaning "mood." Go back further in etymology and we arrive at the Germanic word hugyan, which relates to the Old English hycgan, meaning "to think, consider."  I think that's a lot of hugging.

Hygge is not a new term. It first appeared in Danish writing in the 19th Century. While hygge has exactly the same meaning in Norwegian as in Danish and is a widely used word in Norway "hygge" as a cultural philosophy is mostly a recent Danish phenomenon. In Norway "hygge" is just a word, similar in status to "cozy" in English-speaking countries.

But the hygge lifestyle has moved beyond Denmark and it is taking hold in the United States.

Google

Larry Page and Sergei Brin originally nicknamed their new search engine "BackRub", because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site. But they changed the name to Google.

Supposedly, the name of the search engine originated from a misspelling of the word "googol" which is the number 1 followed by 100 zeros.

10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Googol was picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide very large quantities of information.

The original Google search engine was on the Stanford University website servers with the domains google.stanford.edu and z.stanford.edu. The official domain name for google.com was registered on September 15, 1997 and the company was incorporated on September 4, 1998 when it was still based in a garage.

Some brands become generic nouns as the vernacular word for a category. Such is the case with brands such as Band-Aid (for any adhesive bandage) and Kleenex (for paper tissues) and in the past "fridge" for any refrigerator had originated with the Frigidaire brand. This is both an honor and a brand confusion issue.

People began to use "google" to mean a search engine and eventually as a verb, as in "I'll google that." Larry Page used it as a verb form before he even launched the company. Though not as commonly used to mean "to search" now, at one time "to google" might have meant to use Yahoo or Bing or AltaVista or any one of the other competing search engines.

Blurbs and Bromides

Book jacket with blurbs

A "blurb" sounds like a nonsense word and its origin was a kind of joke. Nowadays, we associate the word with the short comments of praise used to promote a product. You find them on book jackets and ads, and on DVD boxes and movie posters, as well as some other products that use promotional words from celebrities or "real customers."

In 1906 humorist Gelett Burgess wrote a short book called Are You a Bromide. On the cover of his book, there was a promotional quote of "Yes, this a blurb" credited to a Miss Belinda Blurb. Burgess defined a "blurb" as "a flamboyant advertisement; an inspired testimonial." The Miss Belinda Blurb gag caught on and became associated with that type of marketing content.

But Burgess did not invent the idea of putting a promotional quote on a book. Supposedly, it began with Walt Whitman's poetry collection, Leaves of Grass. In response to the publication of the first edition in 1855, Ralph Waldo Emerson had sent Whitman a congratulatory letter, including the phrase "I greet you at the beginning of a great career." So, in the following year when the second edition was published, Whitman had these words stamped in gold leaf on the spine of the books.

Movie poster that uses a number of blurbs

In that same book, Burgess also coined the usage of the word "bromide" as a personification of a sedate, dull person who said boring things, and now bromide means either the boring person itself or more commonly the trite statement of that person.

Actual silver bromide was a chemical used in early photographic printmaking and later bromine salts were used as a sedative. It was also the basis for Bromo-Seltzer, a popular remedy for headaches, upset stomachs and hangovers. That sedated person or hungover person probably inspired the boring person for Burgess' usage.

Examples of bromides he gave in the book included "I don't know much about Art, but I know what I like," "... she doesn't look a day over fifty," "It isn't so much the heat... as the humidity"
and "You're a sight for sore eyes."