A tragedy of the English language
I think it’s a tragedy of the English language that the words “million”, “billion”, and “trillion” sound so similar. The actual difference between each number is hard for people to imagine, even programmers who are used to dealing with large quantities and orders of magnitude. My current favorite illustrative example is:
Let’s say you have an operation that takes 0.5 ms to complete and you need to run it on a large data set. Running it on a million things might take ten minutes, a nice coffee break. Running it on a billion things might take six days, a background process you really don’t want to interrupt or run twice. Running it on a trillion things might take 16 years. Don’t do that.
burrito
The wrap burrito is first found in print in English in Erna Fergusson’s Mexican Cookbook, published in 1934 in New Mexico. However, the burrito described in this cookbook is more like what we’d call a tostada today.
In Mexico, the term seems to have arrived at its modern meaning in the late 1800s; an 1895 dictionary lists the modern usage as one of its meanings, with the other being a regional slang term for “taco”. In Mexican Spanish, burrito originates from a diminutive of burro (donkey). The food is probably so named because it resembles a rolled-up pack often found on the back of a donkey.
The Spanish word burro descends directly from the Latin burricus, meaning small horse, which itself is named after the color burrus, meaning reddish-brown. Latin burrus is a borrowing from Greek πυρρός (purros), meaning flame-colored, yellowish-red, or tawny. The Greek color is clearly named after its root πῦρ (pur), meaning fire, like we see in the borrowed English prefix pyro-.
The animal is also you
You, the consciousness reading this that is successfully converting millions of stimuli with slightly different intensities into symbols or sounds and then extracting meaning from them, cohabit your body with an animal who is also you. That animal is a good girl/boy/pal who wants to be helpful and tries its best but can’t communicate in words with you the way I am doing here. It wants plenty of rest and sun and good food and a stimulating environment and when it feels good, you feel good, because it’s you. And when it feels bad because maybe you’re like young me and don’t know the animal is trying to tell you it needs exercise and you get confused and angry when the animal is grumpy and destructive, you feel bad, because the animal is also you.
cologne
The scented oil cologne is a genericized trademark, named after the fragrance Eau de Cologne, first sold by Italian-German perfumier Giovanni Maria Farina in 1709. Farina’s perfume was citrusy and renowned for being consistently homogeneous. Its fame was such that it was referred to as aqua mirabilis (Latin for “miracle water”) among European nobility, and it cost six months of a clerk’s salary per bottle. When France conquered Cologne as part of the 1797 Treaty of Campo Formio, the free trade regime it imposed led to dozens of imitators selling knockoff Eau de Cologne springing up, prompting its genericization.
Farina named Eau de Cologne after his place of residence, the Free Imperial City of Cologne. Rather than a German name like Kölnisch Wasser (Köln is the name of the city in German), he gave it a French name because it was the lingua franca among European nobility at the time. The company he founded in 1709, Johann Maria Farina gegenüber dem Jülichs-Platz GmbH, still exists and manufactures cologne today.
The city of Cologne was founded around 50 CE as a Roman colony, named Colōnia Agrippina after the woman who supported its promotion from a military garrison, Nero’s mother Julia Agrippina. Ironically, in every language except Latin, over the millennia the “Agrippina” portion of the name was dropped, leaving just Colōnia/Cologne/Köln, Latin for “colony”.
The Latin word colōnia comes from colōnus, meaning colonist or farmer, which in turn comes from colō, meaning to cultivate or till. Colō has been reconstructed to descend from Proto-Indo-European kʷelh₁ some 6000 years ago, meaning to turn, revolve, or dwell. Other words that descend from kʷelh₁ include Greek τέλος (télos) and English wheel.
numeral
I got nerdsniped by the development of the numerals we use last week. It’s difficult to find images of historical numerals! This is the best I was able to reconstruct, with the link between the Shang numerals and the Brahmi numerals only speculative:
Photo of a sheet of paper with a table of written depictions of historical numerals from 0 to 9, with the headings “Shang c. 8700”, “Brahmi c. 10100”, “c. 10600”, “Persian c. 11000”, “Andalusian c. 11400”, and “Typeset c. 11540”
(Dates are in HE for easier parsing across the 1 CE boundary.)
Even though the link between Shang and Brahmi is speculative, it’s startling how strong the link is between Shang and modern Chinese numerals.