Approximate Knowledge

viral

2026-03-06T00:00:00+00:00

The insidious viral is first found as the adjective form of virus in 1948, while its contemporary sense shows up as early as 1989. This is another word where it’s clearer to track forwards in time than backwards.

We can reconstruct the six-thousand-year-old PIE word wisós, meaning “poison”, from an unusually diverse set of descendants: Sanskrit वि॒ष (viṣá), meaning “poison”, “venom”, or “bane”; Ancient Greek ἰός (iós), meaning “poison” or “venom”; Classical Persian بِیش (bīš), meaning “poison”; and Latin vīrus, meaning “poison” or “venom”. Poison has clearly always been an important topic to write about.

As with most medical terms, virus was borrowed into English from Latin (the language of science and medicine) in 1398, with a specific medical definition closer to “pus” or “diseased sputum” than poison. Russian botanist Dmitri Ivanovsky first described the pathogens we now call viruses in an 1892 article, credited in Dutch microbiologist Martinus Beijerinck’s 1898 paper classifying them as distinct from bacteria. Viruses were first visually observed in 1931 and the first flu vaccine was developed in 1945. (The first smallpox vaccine is from 1796! You don’t need to know the theory before you can make useful things!)

Diseases have been described as viral, as opposed to bacterial, since 1948. The infectious analogy was first extended to viral marketing in 1989 to describe a strategy where you get consumers to love your product and convince their workplace to adopt it, using Apple Macintoshes as an example. Meanwhile, the compound computer virus describing self-replicating malware was coined in 1984. Drawing on both influences, the first time a phenomenon was described to go viral on the Internet was in 2000. It had become common parlance by 2004. Viral video was first coined in 2009.

sphinx

2026-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

The enigmatic sphinx first appears in English in 1420 as a borrowing from Medieval Latin Sphinx. That in turn was borrowed from Ancient Greek Σφίγξ (Sphínx), of uncertain origin. People note its similarity to σφίγγω (sphíngō), meaning “to strangle”, but it’s more likely borrowed from the language spoken in Greece before the Myceneans took over around 1600 BCE. As a prominent element of Greek mythology, sphinx can be found with minimal changes across languages within the Greco-Roman cultural sphere, from Russian сфинкс (sfinks) to Danish sfinks and Spanish esfinge.

Perhaps the most famous sphinx, the Great Sphinx of Giza, was not originally called that. Its original name is lost to history, although we can guess that it was built around 4,600 years ago, as its face is modeled on the pharoah Khefre from that timeframe. About 3,400 years ago, the abandoned ancient statue was dug out of the sands and revered as a representation of the sun god Horus. At that time, the statue was called Hor-em-akhet, meaning “Horus of the Horizon”. About 2,700 years ago, visiting Greeks began calling it a sphinx, although it had become mostly reburied at that point, until it was dug out of the sands by Romans about 1,900 years ago. The Great Sphinx’s current visibility dates back to international efforts to dig it out of the sands 140 years ago.

The compound Sphynx cat describing a hairless cat originates from the 1966 cat breed Canadian Sphynx, named because its skin resembled the Great Sphinx’s weathered exterior.

shanghai

2026-02-25T00:00:00+00:00

The forcible coercion shanghai is first attested in 1871 to describe the horrifying practice of forcing unwilling people to become deckhands, most often taken from SF and Portland onto ships bound for Shanghai. Mid-to-late 1800s ships required many deckhands to sail, but recruitment had a tough time competing with the gold rush. You can get a sense of how common this practice was was through the enactment of several federal laws against it across multiple decades. The change that finally ended the practice was the spread of steamships that required much less unskilled labor to operate.

Shanghai is a romanization of the Mandarin pronunciation of 上海 (Shànghǎi), with 上 (Shàng) meaning “upon” and 海 (hǎi) meaning “sea” for a gloss of “On the Sea”. The city of Shanghai got its current name in 1280, with speculation that the city was below sea level at the time. It was likely founded before the common era as a fishing village named 沪 (Hù).

A Frankensteined history

2026-02-20T00:00:00+00:00

Today I learned that the 1818 sonnet Ozymandias, most famous for its excerpt “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! No thing beside remains”, is actually one of two sonnets titled Ozymandias published in British intellectual journal The Examiner in 1818. Its author, Percy Shelley, wrote it as part of an informal contest with his friend Horace Smith to write a poem on that topic. Wikipedia has the text of Smith’s losing and infinitely less famous sonnet at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias_(Smith).

I also learned that Percy Shelley was married to Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein in that same year, 1818. One of her inspirations, and possibly Percy’s, was spending the summer of 1816 at Lake Geneva with renowned poet Lord Byron (Ada Lovelace’s father). 1816 is noteworthy for being the infamous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer.

In 1815, Indonesian volcano Mount Tambora erupted in the most powerful volcanic eruption in human history (in other words, the past ten thousand years). Volcanic ash lingered in the atmosphere for years, leading to strikingly colored skies around the world in 1816 (often immortalized in Romantic paintings), massive crop failures, and a subsequent winter called Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death, where the temperature in New York reached -34C (-30F).

vitamin

2026-02-18T00:00:00+00:00

The essential nutrient class vitamin got its name from Polish-American biochemist Casimir Funk’s 1912 book “The Vitamines”. Funk proposed that four recently discovered chemicals, with the shared property that you get a disease of deficiency if you don’t eat enough, should be grouped together into a single class. His name suggestion vitamine was a portmanteau of “vital amines”, where vital is from Latin vīta, meaning “life”, and amine is the class of organic chemicals they all fall under.

As it turns out, not even all four of those chemicals (now known as vitamins B1, B3, C, and D) were actually amines. British biochemist Jack Drummond successfully proposed a spelling change to vitamin in 1920 to de-emphasize the misnomer once it was widely understood.

Today, Funk’s criteria for vitamins instead define the category of essential nutrients. That is, essential nutrients are chemicals required for human life that we need to ingest in order to get enough to survive. We’ve discovered many more of these since, so for convenience, vitamins are now considered a subcategory of essential nutrients. All of the current subcategories are:

Essential nutrients that are chemical elements are minerals.
Essential nutrients that are fatty acids are essential fatty acids (currently, we are only aware of omega-3 and omega-6).
Essential nutrients that are amino acids are essential amino acids (of which there are nine).
Essential nutrients that don’t fall into any other category are vitamins.
- Well, except for choline, which is currently none of the above as it was only proven essential in 1998. I feel like this classification scheme is a pretty good illustration of what tends to happen to the first discovered subgroup of a new concept.

It’s also worth noting that essential oils are unrelated to essential minerals or essential nutrients, instead earning their adjective for containing the essence (fragrance) of a material.

Vitamins are typically referred to by letter today because American biochemist Elmer McCollum described a newly-discovered vitamin with the placeholder name “fat-soluble factor A” in a 1913 paper. By analogy, biochemists started calling three of Funk’s proposed vitamins “water-soluble factor B”, “water-soluble factor C”, and “fat-soluble factor D”. The fourth, now known as niacin, was instead called vitamin PP, as it was determined to Prevent Pellagra. It was later renamed to B3 when it was classified a B vitamin.

(If, like me, you’ve idly wondered what happened to vitamins F through J, wikipedia has a handy table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin#Naming)

Why salt?

2026-02-16T00:00:00+00:00

The most common road and sidewalk de-icer in use today is rock salt (aka halite, aka sodium chloride). While there are more effective de-icers, NaCl’s predominance is because it’s cheap, which is very relevant at the scale street de-icer is used. It has two primary mechanisms of action: one, the uneven surface increases traction; and two, the freezing point of salt water is -17C (0F) rather than 0C (32F), so at temperatures between -17C and 0C, less ice actually forms.

Salt’s cheapness is extra funny from a historical perspective. Salt was an essential trade good whose importance is clear from the salt mines of Salzburg (literally, “salt castle”) to the Classical Latin noun salarium (literally, “saltiness”), the ancestor of English salary. It’s not just that you will literally die if you don’t eat enough salt; it’s also an important way to preserve food in the millennia before refrigeration.

Salt deficiency’s mechanism of action of causing death turns out to be the same as what you die from if you drink too much water, hyponatremia. Water is the substance with the highest known LD50: an average person has a 50% chance of dying after drinking about 7 liters (2 gallons) of water in one sitting. The least deadly substance known to man is somehow still the cause of most deaths by drowning.

barbecue

2026-02-06T00:00:00+00:00

The cuisine barbecue first appears in American English as a loanword from American Spanish barbacoa, meaning “barbecue”, around 1700. Barbacoa, reborrowed into English in 1953 as barbacoa referring specifically to Mexican cuisine, was itself a loanword, but its history remains unclear. The consensus is that it’s a borrowing from Taíno barbakoa, meaning “framework of sticks”, but the word’s popularization seems to originate in Mexico, which did not have many Taíno (or other Arawakan language) speakers. The OED instead attributes it to Haitian barbacòa (through Taíno), but there’s also speculation it’s from Mayan Baalbak’Kaab instead.

In any case, the slow cooking of leaf-wrapped meat in an oven constructed in a hole in the ground is widespread among indigenous Mesoamerican cultures. In the Yucatan, the Mayan word for the oven is píib, and the resulting cooked meat is called pibil.

Today barbecue mostly refers to regional US cuisines. The cookout event barbecue is from 1733 (George Washington writes about attending a Virginia barbicue in 1769). The grill barbecue is from 1931. Of the four major regional US traditions, Carolina barbecue goes back to at least 1760, Texas barbecue is clearly distinct by 1860, Kansas City barbecue splits off in 1908, and Memphis barbecue is well established by 1950. The clipping Bar-B-Q is from 1926, further abbreviated to BBQ by 1938. Heinz began selling barbecue sauce nationally in 1940. Barbie originates from Australian slang in 1976.

normal

2026-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

The value judgment normal has an extremely normal history. It originates with PIE ǵneh₃-, meaning “to know”, incidentally also the ancestor of the English word know. 3000 years ago, one of its descendants was Ancient Greek γνώμων (gnṓmōn), meaning “examiner” or “carpenter’s square”, the tool you use to measure right angles. It also referred to the thing that sticks up at a right angle in the middle of a sundial due to its similar shape, from where we borrowed English gnomon.

The word was borrowed into Classical Latin maybe 2200 years ago as norma, meaning only “carpenter’s square”. Over the next thousand years, the meaning became generalized to “rule” or “pattern”, from where we borrowed English norm. A derived word, Classical Latin normālis, meant “made according to a carpenter’s square”. This is the sense we borrowed normal from around 1704, then meaning “at right angles” or “perpendicular to”. Normal still refers to right angles in some modern technical usages like normal vector (often shortened to normals, in the graphics sense).

By the 1840s, influenced by norm, normal started typically meaning “according to a rule or pattern” instead. With the help of new fields of ergonomics and standards, by 1890 the word’s meaning had generalized to referring to usual or common values, based on observed patterns. Within a few decades, its usage had changed to almost always mean “typical state or condition”.

Abnormal is attested as early as 1817. The normal distribution was named by Carl Gauss in 1823 based on the “perpendicular” meaning, which is why we interchangeably say Gaussian distribution (or Gaussian blur). In 1835, we calqued normal school from French école normale, meaning “teacher’s college” by way of teaching the teachers to enforce the norms. Most US schools founded as normal schools are now public colleges, including the Normal University founded in 1857 in Illinois, now Illinois State University but located in the eponymous city of Normal, Illinois. Paranormal shows up in 1905. Normie is from 1950. Normcore first appears around 2008. Having a normal one starts becoming popular around 2022.

syllabus

2026-01-16T00:00:00+00:00

The academic summary syllabus is first used as an English word in 1653, borrowed from Late Latin syllabus, meaning “list”. Syllabus comes from a misprint in a 1470s copy of a Cicero work, duplicated faithfully for centuries. The Latin word was originally sittybas, a borrowing from Ancient Greek σιττύβας (sittúbas), meaning “parchment label”. Σιττύβας were leather slips placed on the ends of scrolls in Greek libraries with a table of contents so that scribes could more quickly find the right scrolls.

pajamas

2026-01-10T00:00:00+00:00

The outfit pajamas first appears in English as a loanword from Urdu, in a British newsletter about South Asia in 1800. In Urdu, it’s written پاجام (pājāma), or पाजामा (pājāmā) in Hindi, and has the same meaning. Those descend from Classical Persian پَاجَامَه (pājāma), meaning “pants”, through the Islamic Mughal Empire’s conquest of northern India. The Persian word comes from Persian roots پَا (pā), meaning “leg”; and جَامَه (jāma), meaning “clothing”. A much more prosiac origin than pants. Finally, pā descends from PIE ped-, meaning “foot”. Deep down, it’s all from the same root found in pedal, podium, or foot.

UK and Commonwealth English instead prefer the spelling pyjamas, based on the alternate Hindi spelling पैजामा (paijāmā), based on the alternate Persian spelling پَای (pāy). The British fashion of men using pajamas as nightwear is more recent, dating to 1870. Before that, the customary sleepwear was a nightshirt, or a nightgown for women. The abbreviation PJs is from 1930, while jammies is first seen in 1928. Pajama party as a subtype of slumber party is from the 1950s. Pajamas were briefly high fashion outerwear in the late 1960s and 1970s, but did not become common street clothes until their 2018 revival. The Australian children’s TV show “Bananas in Pyjamas” began airing in 1992.