Ad-lib

Ad-lib is one of the most common Latin phrases used in English. Ad-lib is the shortened version of "ad libitum" which is Latin for "at one's pleasure" or "as you desire." Sometimes it is translated as meaning "at liberty" simply because of that "lib" syllable, but that is not an accurate translation.

The most common use in drama when used to describe times in performance when a performer uses words not found in the text. (When the entire performance is spontaneous and unscripted it is called improvisation.) This occurs on the live stage, in films, on television and frequently in situations such as the conversations on talk-shows, news, podcasts etc.

Larry David's HBO series, Curb Your Enthusiasm, is often pointed to as an example of ad-lib drama. The show can also be said to use "retroscripting." The series also has created its own collection of words and phrases, as noted in the video shown here.

Less well known is its use as a direction in sheet music where "ad libitum" indicates that the performer or conductor has one of a variety of types of discretion with respect to a given passage.

Ad libitum is also used in psychology and biology to refer to the "free-feeding" weight of an animal when the animal eats as it wishes rather than its weight on a restricted diet.

Boilerplate

NASA engineers inspect and test a boilerplate Mercury space capsule.
Image: NASA on The Commons

You will sometimes hear material referred to as being "boilerplate."

In my own academic work, it is sometimes used to describe a general statement, such as a grading policy, used as a starting place that teachers can modify to their needs, or sometimes, it is used "as is."

I have also heard it used to describe standardized pieces of text for contracts, and as a portion of a computer program. As the illustration above shows, it can also be used to describe a non-textual object.

In newspaper publishing, before the days of digital printing. There was syndicated material supplied to smaller newspapers in a printing plate form. This was particularly true for weekly newspapers who could use these feature stories, editorials, etc. supplied by large publishing syndicates. Rather than having to set type for the story, it was delivered on metal plates with the type already in place. They were given the name "boiler plates" because they looked like the plating used in making steam boilers.

The word "boilerplate" was used to refer to the printed material on the plates as well as to the plates themselves. Boilerplate stories were often more considered "filler" than hard news, and so the the word acquired a negative connotation. Some modern dictionaries will list its meaning as including the sense of boilerplate being hackneyed, unoriginal or clichéd writing that expresses a generally accepted opinion or belief.

You will also still find it meaning the rolled steel used for making boilers. And a more specialized meaning, as used in climbing, is to describe smooth, overlapping and undercut slabs of rock.

Rx (prescription)

I found several different theories about the origin of this symbol "Rx" used by doctors before a prescription. Is it an abbreviation? Is it some ancient chemical symbol?

Several origins sound less credible. One source said that Rx is a corruption of the symbol for Jupiter and that a prayer to Jupiter would speed healing. That doesn't make sense to me since Jupiter (also known as Jove) was the god of the sky and thunder and king of the gods in Ancient Roman religion and mythology and not associated with healing.

I couldn't find a symbol for the god, but the symbol for the planet looks like an odd 4 and is said to represent an eagle, which is Jupiter's bird.

Another theory is that the Rx symbol evolved from the Eye of Horus, an ancient Egyptian symbol associated with healing powers. This has a bit more believability because pharmacy has been around for thousands of years and the first recorded prescriptions were etched on a clay tablet in Mesopotamia around 2100 B.C. There were the equivalent of drugstores in Baghdad in the eighth century A.D.

The problem is that the Eye of Horus (also known as wadjet, wedjat or udjat) though it is an ancient Egyptian symbol of protection, royal power, and good health, doesn't look like the Rx.

The most likely origin is that this symbol seen on doctor’s prescription pads and signs in pharmacies is derived from the Latin word “recipe,” meaning “take.”  The word recipe has had the same function from the 13th through the 17th centuries. The two letters were a 19th-century way of easily reproducing a 16th-century symbol - the letter R with a line through its slanted leg.
℞  that meant the "R" is functioning as an abbreviation - not an X.
It wasn't till around 1911 that "Rx" came to be used as meaning the the noun "prescription." A recipe associated with cooking came into being in the early 17th century, which is when America’s earliest drugstores came into being in big cities. The first college of pharmacy in the United States was founded in 1821 in Philadelphia.

Today in America, the centuries old mortar and pestle - tools of the trade - is often used by pharmacists as an industry symbol along with Rx.

Interrobang

The ‘interrobang’ is both an odd word and an odd piece of punctuation.

I am surely not alone in having typed or written ?! or !? at the end of a sentence to indicate that I am both puzzled and shocked.  "The President said what?!"

The interrobang (sometimes as interrabang) combines the exclamation point with a question mark. In the jargon of printers and programmers, this is called a "bang." The glyph is a superimposition of these two marks, as shown here.

The interrobang is not a standard punctuation mark. Few modern typefaces or fonts include a glyph that you can use for the interrobang character. But it can be made in some cases.

The interrobang can be used in some word processors with the alt code Alt+8253 when working in a font that supports the interrobang, or using an operating system that performs font substitution.

You can use it with some keystrokes. In Microsoft Word, try Alt + 8253. In HTML: &#8253.  The standard interrobang is at Unicode code point U+203D will produce ‽ (size increased here for clarity)

Martin K. Speckter conceptualized the interrobang in 1962 while working as the head of an advertising agency. Ge thought that advertisements would look better if copywriters conveyed surprised rhetorical questions using a single mark.

He proposed the concept of a single punctuation mark in an article in the magazine TYPEtalks and asked for suggestions for a name for the new character. Some suggestions were exclamaquest, QuizDing, rhet, and exclarotive, He chose interrobang because  interrogatio is Latin for "rhetorical question" or "cross-examination" and bang is printers' slang for the exclamation mark.

May Day, Mayday and SOS

Vulcan and Maia (1585) by Bartholomäus Spranger

First off, the month of May was named for the Greek goddess Maia, who was identified with the earlier Roman goddess of fertility, Bona Dea, whose festival was held in May.

The holiday called May Day falls on the first day of May and it is a chance to celebrate spring moving into summer. Included in the outdoor celebrations is dancing around a maypole. In Wales, this festival was connected to the May Queen (Creiddylad) and the maypole and its dance is a remnant of the old festivities.

May Day is an ancient northern hemisphere spring festival and today is a national holiday in more than 80 countries and celebrated less officially in other countries.

But May Day is not to be confused with the distress call mayday which is used primarily by aviators and mariners, but in some countries local organizations such as firefighters, police forces, and transportation organizations also use the term. This term came into English in the early 1900s. It derives from the French venez m'aider, meaning "come help me".

The call is always given three times in a row ("Mayday Mayday Mayday") to distinguish an actual Mayday call from a message about a Mayday call. (Making a false distress call in the United States is a federal crime.)

The Mayday call sign originated in 1923 with Frederick Stanley Mockford who was a radio officer at Croydon Airport in London. He thought, especially because much of the traffic at the time was between Croydon and Le Bourget Airport in Paris, that "mayday" from the French would be understood by both sides since it was taken from the French m'aider ('help me'), a shortened form of venez m'aider ('come and help me').

While ships can also  issue a mayday radio call, originally the Morse code "SOS" was the more common distress signal. "SOS" does not mean Save Our Souls or Save Our Ship as I was once told. It was adopted in 1905 by German ships for signifying distress. The British working with Marconi radio operators wanted to keep CQD (General Call Disaster though sometimes translated as Come Quick Disaster) as a distress signal.

It was first suggested to use SOE, but the small "E" dot in Morse code can easily be lost. The suggestion was then to use SOS, which was adopted at the Berlin Radiotelegraphic Convention in 1906 as the official international standard for distress calls. The first time the SOS signal was used in an emergency was on June 10, 1909 when the Cunard liner "SS Slavonia" wrecked off the Azores.