Planned disruption of service
I’m delighted to be invited to Inkhaven, a writer’s retreat for bloggers. I’ll be writing onsite in Berkeley, CA for the month of April. They take an iron blogger approach to improving as a writer, so I’ve made a new blog category for Inkhaven posts. As such, I will either be posting daily, or be the first person ever kicked out of the retreat for not posting daily.
To borrow a phrase from the Recurse Center, my goal for the month is to become a dramatically better writer. I know I will necessarily struggle and flail on the way, and I hope you find the end result to be worth the temporary disruption.
yolo
The interjection yolo was popularized by its use in Canadian rapper Drake’s 2011 single The Motto. The titular motto was YOLO, pronounced as a word. The acronym YOLO standing for “you only live once” can be sporadically found as early as 1993, as the longhand phrase “you only live once” has been in the language for over 100 years.
Yolo’s popularity peaked in 2012, when it was beaten out at word of the year awards by words like gif and hashtag. The OED began including yolo as an English word worthy of documentation in 2016.
jetlag
The condition jetlag is first attested in a 1965 newspaper article. Before that, people called it time zone syndrome. The first regular jetliner service began in 1958, the airplane type named for the turbojet engines that made them possible. Boeing inaugurated the jetliner naming scheme they still use today with the 707. Planes powered by turbojet engines first flew in 1944, marking a 14-year timespan from first deployment to consumer availability.
A jet engine is an engine that generates thrust by expelling a jet of fast moving fluid opposite the direction of movement, propelling the craft forward. This definition technically includes both hydrojet/pumpjet watercraft engines and rocket engines, but “jet engine” typically only refers to aircraft engines. Many marine animals are also jet-propelled, including all jellyfish and octopuses. Before jet engines, powered aircraft flew by using propellers to generate thrust.
Emitted jets of water or air were named in the 1660s through a borrowing from French jet, meaning “a throw”. French jet can be traced back to Old French get, then Vulgar Latin jectus and Classical Latin iactus, all meaning “a throw”. Iactus is a form of iacere, which just means “to throw”. Meanwhile, lag first appears in English in the 1530s with the same meaning as today, and has an uncertain origin. Wisdom teeth were called lag-teeth in the 1610s.
battery
The electric storage medium battery was coined by American polymath Benjamin Franklin in a 1749 letter describing his apparatus of a bunch of Leyden jars all connected together, by analogy with a battery of guns. Artillery batteries have been called that since the 1550s because they inflict battery on a targeted fortress or castle. That violent battery, the latter half of assault and battery, was borrowed from French as legal vocabulary in the 1530s, not much earlier.
Middle French batterie was derived from the verb batre, meaning “beat”. Old French batre descends from Latin battuō, also meaning “beat”. Latin battuō is likely a borrowing from Gaulish, the Celtic language spoken in France before its Roman conquest.
viral
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.