Songs without Words

Part 1.

As my first post in a long while, I want to highlight a couple words from the family derived from the root “leuk-” meaning “light” or “white”

Luna/lunar: goddess of the moon, and pertaining to the moon.  An obvious object which is both white and bright

> Lunatic: a crazy person, originally blamed on the full moon.

> Lundi: the French word for the first weekday, the English counterpart of which (Monday) also refers to the moon.

Luster/lustrous: a sparkle or sheen to a surface or object

> Illustrate: originally meaning “to bring light to” or “to illuminate,” I find it interesting how it is still relevant for modern “illustrators,” who by depicting concepts in visual form, are seeking to clarify and illuminate a subject for the audience.

Lumen: a unit of light, but also the inner surface of a biological vessel or duct, referring maybe to the light coming in from the aperture of a tunnel-like object?

Lucid: clear, transparent; and lucent: shining

> Pellucid: similar, as in the zona pellucida around an egg (oocyte)

Lucifer: the bringer of light/morning star, and another name for Satan

> Luciferase, any enzyme including that found in fireflies, which cleaves a substrate to release light

Leukocyte: a white blood cell, part of the immune system.

> Leukemia: a cancer of the white blood cells in the bloodstream (lymphoma is the solid tumor equivalent)

To my knowledge, the word “luxury” does not actually derive from the same root, nor do “lust” or “luster” in the sexual sense.

Part 2.

Splitting roots.  Just a short note about how two-consonant combinations in roots can end up split in both pronunciation and eventually the conception of a word.

Helicopter = “helico” (spiral, like in “helix” or “Helicobacter,” a bacterial genus including a common species causing stomach ulcers) + “pter” (winged), but we split this has “heli” and “copter,” the latter of which is the accepted short form for the word.

Diagnostic = “dia” (through, by) + “gnostic” (pertaining to knowledge), but the pronunciation splits this as “diag” and “nostic,” which is reflected then in neologisms such as “theranostic,” a therapy which is also useful as a diagnostic; this term is rarely spelled more properly as “theragnostic.”

A significant portion of my studying (which of course isn’t saying very much, since I can’t focus on studying very well with all these problems) is devoted to figuring out what words mean. Once you get a word, it often saves you the trouble of having to memorize a separate definition.

Today’s focus: “chole,” courtesy of respective Wikipedia articles and Dictionary.com etymologies.

“Chole” is the root meaning “bile.” Therefore, cholic acid is a component of bile. Cholesterol (the alcoholic solid in bile) is so-named because it can precipitate to form a particular type of gallstone (“cholelith”), found amidst the bile stored within the gallbladder.

The gallbladder is a bile-containing pouch and therefore has the prefix “cholecyst-” (where a cyst is an enclosed sac, corresponding to “bladder” in the instances of the bladder, “cyst-” and gallbladder, “cholecyst-“). A cholecystectomy (cutting of the bile-containing sac) is the surgical removal of the gallbladder. The hormone CCK, short for cholecystokinin (movement of the bile-containing sac), is a hormone produced by duodenal and jejunal I cells which is involved in bile let-down from the gallbladder as well as pancreatic enzyme secretion.

However, “cholic” (pertaining to bile) has nothing to do with “colic” (pertaining to the colon). When a person has “colicky” pain, it relates to pain of the colon, not to bile acid.

As an aside, the punctuation mark called the colon (:) is derived from Greek kwlon (omega first) while the organ called the colon is derived from Greek kolon (omicron first). So, they do not have a common etymological root.

There are certain days when I’m just in the mood for that short, unsatisfying piece of modern literature sitting somewhere near the back of the New Yorker magazine. I remember once going to Hayden, I think fully intending to read some usual fare of Newtype magazine, an anime/manga periodical with about as much writing and literature as the label on a bottle of Coke. Regardless of the circumstances, when I came to sit down, I found myself with the smaller, square-bound volume from the shelf below Newtype’s. There, I read the fiction stories, one after another, looking, searching for some purpose or point to them. But of course, there inevitably was none.

Today, at MGH, I came across a New Yorker, just sitting there on the counter, with three covers (yellow, orange, red), forming a sort of flip-book triptych if you will.  I was in one of those semi-funks, as it were, harking back to the good old grade school days when I’d be happy for a month, sad for a year – thereabouts on the timescale.  It’s been something of a down month for me, despite many intensely warming conversations with my Love, and good chuckles with labmates as the sun would begin to set, and of course the now-routine dinners (whoop, did you know that Wisteria House (TW) is coming to the Super 88 Food Connection??).  It’s been a down month for precisely the reason why New Yorker fiction sits on those three or four pages, disaffectionate and ever resistant to fulfilled satisfaction.

If a girl and guy meet and enjoy one another and have sex, she’ll have six or seven abortions.  Then leave or something.  If a man has a father, he won’t attend his funeral.  If there are stairs, paragraphs will be devoted to writing about people running up and down them, bumping into people.  But nothing will come of it.

The aura of the story is not the bleakness I just described: it’s the way the author reacts to it, or rather, precisely the manner in which the author does not react.  And it was in this manner in which I did not react to the people around me, to the worries in my heart, that primed my sore eyes and dry, sanded-down fingertips for a session with this latest fiction entry.  I wasn’t sad, per se, and certainly not feeling misanthropic – I actually feel I was near my kindest today at the hospital – but I was yearning to stare into that segment of nearly incomprehensible, raw prose.  And stare I did.  It felt just like that; it’s a medicine, I think.  A medicine for the person seeking no answers and no questions, only a distilled mockery of life and the human condition.

I’ve started a sort of informal tradition of reading one existentialist play a day.  I think it’s a good thing!

Anyway, today I’m reading No Exit (Jean-Paul Sartre), and honestly it’s one of the most amazing pieces of literature I’ve ever set my eyes upon.  The plot grinds forward with brutal words, yet the effect is so subtle, the conclusion slipping under the currents, that it’s only as the noise reaches critical mass that you suddenly realize what has happened.  Mmmm …~

Another UROP in my lab has gotten me into playing this game … you just try to make words from a set of 6 letters. If you get one or more six-letter words, you can advance to the next round, so that is the main priority. The other words earn you extra points. My high score is 15,960 … let me know if any of you guys beat that ^___^.

[Edit:] Well, that was quick ^^.  My Love went ahead and pulled off the rather “sexy” *wink wink* score of 20,860.  @_@ whoot~!  You go girl ^___^

Ooh ooh, this is a really nifty linguistic concept, and the Wikipedia article is short and succinct: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junctural_metanalysis.

One of the strangest ways a language evolves is through the “telephone” effect (if you’ve ever played that game), in which letters get mis-segmented into words due to alternate hearings. For instance, it is said that the word “newt” used to be “ewt,” but people repeatedly saying “an ewt” started saying “a newt” instead. The jumping of n’s as a result of English’s funny (but absolutely necessary -trust me; I tried using only “a” in Cat language, and it was extremely hard to pronounce) indefinite pronoun fix seems to be the most common, although the directionality of the n is not fixed. For instance, the word “orange” used to be “norange,” but the n got pushed into the “a.” Not kidding, seriously!  The Persian language still retains the word “narang.”
I think the example at the very bottom of “helicopter” is rather interesting. Here, it is a misdivision of roots, not a misdivision of separate words. I think Wikipedia, in typing only the Greek, makes it more difficult to figure out what the point is, so I’ll briefly explain here: the word “helix” becomes a root in words such as helicobacter (helico (spiral) + bacter (bacterium)). The root of “pter” is seen in Pteradactyl (Ptera (flying) + dactyl (digit, finger)), a type of dinosaur-like flying lizard.

Hence, it is natural that a vehicle that flies by spiralling would be called a HELICO-PTER. But I challenge you to pronounce it that way — Heh’-lee-kou-ptehr”. See? So now it’s Heli-cop-ter and you get things like helipad (landing pad for helicopters).

Ah, is this too much word-nerdiness for you guys? ~_^

This post is dedicated to words of the “-logue” family, discussing my constant confusion over whether the “ue” is to be dropped or not in proper spelling.

Words that I spell -gue: homologue, analogue (Biological sense only!), decalogue, dialogue (a conversation), prologue, epilogue

Words that I spell -g: catalog, analog (EE sense), dialog (when I mean a computer dialog box).

Whereas I have seen homolog and dialog (esp. in computer programming), I have *never* seen prolog or epilog. I have also seen “catalogue” and in fact spelled it that way in class today, although I normally don’t. So what really decides whether a word’s -ue can be dropped or not? Hrm …….