debt
The word for a thing that is owed debt first appears in English in the 1200s as a borrowing from Old French dete. As a reminder, in the 1200s in England, the peasants spoke English and the nobility spoke French. The King of England did not speak English. Usually, we retain the English words from that period, but sometimes we retain the French word instead, or both words (e.g. English-derived help and French-derived aid, or English-derived lake and French-derived lagoon). In the case of debt, we retained just the French word and lost the Middle English word shild (Old English scyld, German cognate Schuld).
So wait, if we borrowed the word from dete, and spelled it dette as pronounced in the 1300s, where did the silent ‘b’ come from? In the 1400s, literate people in England typically knew Latin and believed English should be more like the ursprache Latin. Well, in Latin, there’s this word dēbitum, meaning debt, that the French word is descended from. So scribes from that period all ended up agreeing to put the vestigial ‘b’ back into the spelling, cursing us to this day.
Dēbitum would of course later be borrowed into English on its own merits as debit, but that wouldn’t happen for several hundred years.
quark
The subatomic particle quark gets its name from one of the two physicists who independently proposed its existence in 1964, Murray Gell-Mann. Incidentally, Murray is the same person Gell-Mann amnesia (the tendency to take media reporting at face value in fields you don’t know well, despite seeing how inaccurate it is in fields you do know well) was named for by Michael Crichton.
Murray reports he knew what sound he wanted to associate with the theoretical particles, /kwork/, before deciding how to spell it. He came across the spelling in James Joyce’s 1939 book Finnegans Wake, where it is used as a mocking nonsense word, but is pronounced to rhyme with “bark” and “mark”. Making sense of James Joyce’s inspirations is where the trail ends, though it’s often proposed that the nonsense word is ultimately from a German word of Slavic origin, “Quark”, meaning “cottage cheese” or “rubbish”.
Quarks were later proven to actually exist in a 1968 experiment. Murray’s initially proposed three flavors (aligning with Joyce’s usage, “Three quarks for Muster Mark!”) were eventually extended to their current count of six in a 1975 paper. I love the poetic names truth and beauty for the fifth and sixth flavors, but they are now typically called top and bottom. Notably, the top quark was not confirmed to exist until 1995.
George Zweig, the other physicist who proposed the existence of quarks in 1964, instead favored the name ace for the class of particles.
stan
The devotional verb stan begins appearing in 2008 as a generalization of the noun stan. The noun originates from a 2000 song by Eminem, titled “Stan”, about an encounter with an eponymous obsessive fan. This usage didn’t start catching on until after 2005, but by 2015 it was notable enough to merit an entry in the OED’s blog. By 2017, it warranted a full entry in the big dictionary.
As a given name, Stan is short for Stanley, which seems to mostly originate from places named Stanley in England. Stanley is Old English for “stone meadow” (stān + lēah), which seems like a reasonable name to give to a bunch of different places.
minute
The time unit minute is first attested in English in the late 1300s, a borrowing from Old French minute, which is in turn borrowed from Medieval Latin minūta. The story of minūta is where it gets interesting. In Classical Latin, that word only means “very small”. The “small” sense of minute was actually borrowed into English later, in the mid-1400s.
So going all the way back, the Sumerian numeral system was written in base 60, or sexagesimal. We have written evidence for that going back 5,000 years. The Babylonians adopted their own base-60 system thousands of years later due to Sumerian influence. So it happened that Babylonian astronomy, which was developed 2,700 years ago and heavily influenced Greek, Arabic, and Indian astronomy, used a base-60 numeral system. One way this manifested was that they divided circles into 360 degrees, and when they needed subdivisions, each further subdivision was into 60 parts.
Hundreds of years later, when translating Greek astronomy into Latin, the subdivisions of degrees came to be called pars minuta prima, “first small part”. The next subdivisions were pars minuta secunda, “second small part”, and pars minuta tertia, “third small part”. So when measuring very small fractions of a circle, as in astronomy or latitude/longitude, you used degrees, minutes, and seconds for precision. Today we say New York is at 40.7128° N owing to the invention of digital calculators, but just a hundred years ago you’d instead write 40°42′46″ N.
But that pars minuta prima only refers to measurements of arc, not time. Subdividing an hour into 60 parts first happened much, much later, in the الآثار الباقية عن القرون الخالية (Kitāb al-āthār al-bāqiyah `an al-qurūn al-khāliyah) “The Remaining Signs of Past Centuries”, an influential comparative history of timekeeping, written in 1000 by Abu Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni. This subdivision of the hour into 60 parts only makes it into Medieval Latin in 1267, thanks to Roger Bacon.
It blows my mind that there wasn’t a standard unit of time smaller than an hour for so long! The first clock with a minute hand wasn’t constructed until 1577!
Best of 2024
I’m hoping to begin an annual tradition of looking back on 20 works I first discovered and really enjoyed that year. I like the idea that doing something for three years makes it into a tradition, so here’s my second strike:
Games
- Unicorn Overlord (2024) - Atlus’s take on Ogre Battle continuously surprised me with how thoughtfully it was designed. I ended up leading a 60-person army that did not contain any generic characters.
- Backpack Hero (2023) - What if inventory tetris was the entire game? This cute roguelike is just that.
- Animal Well (2024) - Spooky puzzle metroidvania with no combat besides bosses and a remarkably unique toolset. Animals are weird and this game really leans into that.
- DDR A3 (2022) - Finally appeared at my arcade this summer. I’ve been into DDR for 24 years and this has the consistently highest quality stepcharts I’ve ever played. Even more poignant knowing the 2024 release, DDR World, is awful.
- Metaphor: ReFantazio (2024) - I was very skeptical of “Persona 5, but it’s in a fantasy world”, but this iteration maintains its best-in-class style while delivering on its promise of an epic fantastical journey.
- Rise of the Golden Idol (2024) - More satisfying bite-sized mysteries, but being set in the 1970s instead of the 1770s really helps cement the series’s theme of “people with power do grotesque things with it” by making it more relatable.
- Dragon Age: Veilguard (2024) - Probably Bioware’s last epic. You manage an endearing crew of skilled misfits through a meticulously detailed world where it’s been 10 years, both in real time and in-game time, since the last installment.
- Caves of Qud (2024) - A traditional roguelike with the premise, “what if instead of more and more powerful magic items, you found more and more powerful technological items?” Wildly trans*. Like nothing else out there.
Books
- A City on Mars (2023) - Kelly and Zach Weinersmith research offworld settlement in great detail, only to come to the deeply unpopular conclusion that it’s not feasible any time soon. I learned a lot about the actual governance of international regions, like Antarctica and the ocean depths.
- The Secret to Superhuman Strength (2021) - Alison Bechdel (of the eponymous test) writes a memoir about sixty years of fitness fads intertwined with professional success and concomitant romantic failures.
- Outlive (2023) - Peter Attia summarizes what we currently know about how to have the best chance of being active and independent when you’re eighty.
- Dopamine Nation (2021) - Anna Lembke offers advice on navigating a world of things engineered to be addictive and pleasurable, through the lens of a psychiatrist working with many different kinds of addicts.
Music
- Bella Poarch - Villain (2022) - Poppy and catchy.
- Wet Leg - Chaise Longue (2021) - Alt-rock and stuffed with innuendo, inspired by the feeling of being extremely horny while on tour.
- Otyken - Genesis (2023) - An incredible indigenous Siberian-inspired piece.
- dan paladin - Watermelon (2006) - Endearingly weird chiptunes.
- Hellzapoppin’ - Ambiguous (2024) - Japanese indie electro swing. I have heard this described as “the most Jesse song imaginable.”
Other
- Hymn of Breaking Strain (1935) - A Rudyard Kipling poem about engineering tolerances that I found incredibly moving.
- Make Some Noise (2022) - I enjoyed Whose Line is it Anyway? a lot in the 2000s. This is that but better, half of the comedians are women, and the host isn’t terrible at improv. The points still don’t matter.
- Pissing Out Cancer with Hank Green (2024) - Hank Green gets cancer and decides to learn how to do standup comedy in order to write a comedy special about it. He nails it. He includes errata at the end.