Osculating orbits

Here's a good one for today. A few weeks ago I went to a talk, and on one of the speaker's slides there appeared the phrase "osculating Cartesian covariance". I had no idea what that was, but since "osculate" means "to kiss", I was pretty sure that he'd meant "oscillating" instead.

So, feeling fairly smug, I was mentioning the error to my coworker afterwards when a bystander said, "Actually, 'osculating' is the correct term there." I was embarrassed and rather puzzled as to what it could possibly mean, so I looked it up. Indeed, there is such a thing as an osculating orbit, which is the orbit a celestial body would travel around its primary gravitational influence in the absence of perturbing forces like other planets or satellites. The term comes from the fact that at any point in time and space, a body's osculating orbit is tangent to (i.e. touches or "kisses") its actual orbit.

The king's not the thing

When the word "reify" popped up recently on a "Word of the Day" application I have, I was sure I could guess the definition. I knew what "deify" (from Latin deus, god) meant, and I thought for certain that "reify" must be from Latin rex, king---and thus probably meant "to crown as king" or "to treat as a king".

Actually, the root is not rex but res, a delightful word whose brevity belies its multitude of meanings. I learned its translation in first-year Latin as "thing, matter, or affair" but never really understood it until I encountered it in contexts like res publica or in medias res. And so, in fact, "reify" has nothing to do with kings but means "to convert into or regard as a concrete thing, e.g. to reify a concept".

Incidentally, the above-mentioned application from Merriam-Webster is pretty cool. It not only gives you a word's definition, but also a sample sentence and an interesting fact. Even when I'm already familiar with the word of the day, I usually end up learning something.

Foreign accents and more than you ever wanted to know about verbs

When someone is perceived to speak English with a foreign accent, there are at least two different elements involved. The first is what the American Heritage Dictionary explains as

A characteristic pronunciation, especially:
1. One determined by the regional or social background ofthe speaker.
2. One determined by the phonetic habits of the speaker'snative language carried over to his or her use of another language.

This is what most accent reduction programs seem to focus on: individual vowel and consonant sounds, syllabic stress, etc. Another element, however, is the set of characteristic grammatical errors made by speakers whose native language is not English. It is this aspect that allows me to detect when something I'm reading has been written by a native Chinese speaker, for instance. Because Chinese has no articles and no inflected forms for plural nouns or verb tenses, native Chinese speakers frequently omit these constructions when speaking or writing English. "Yesterday I went to the store and bought an apple for fifty cents" would become, "Yesterday I go to store and buy apple for fifty cent".

Examining these characteristic errors can also provide insight into the grammar of a particular language. I've never studied Russian, but I've noticed that many Russian speakers make excessive use of the present progressive. My violin teacher, who grew up in Moscow, says things like, "When I am practicing this passage, I am thinking about relaxing this finger" whereas a native English speaker would use the simple present, i.e. "When I practice this passage, I think about relaxing this finger". I finally began to wonder whether there's something about the Russian language that emphasizes the progressive aspect of verbs, and sure enough, there is.

In elementary school grammar we usually learn only about a verb's tense, which is simply where the action occurs in time, i.e. past, present, or future. But verbs have another quality called aspect, which describes the state of completion of the action. It can be incomplete (imperfect), as in "I was going to the store, or complete (perfect), as in "I went to the store". This is the difference between the Spanish imperfect ("iba a la tienda") and preterite ("fui a la tienda"), or the imperfect and aorist in Ancient Greek. Based on the superficial knowledge of Russian verbs I've managed to gain by perusing sites like this one and this one, in Russian the aspect of a verb is more important than its tense, and most verbs come in imperfective-perfective pairs. I'm guessing that when Russian speakers learn English, they're somehow taught that the equivalent for their imperfective verb is formed by the English present progressive (to be + present participle), whereas the simple present tense is much more idiomatic and often conveys that progressive aspect implicitly.

By the way, the term "perfect" when used to describe a verb has nothing to do with the connotation of "flawless", as I wondered when I first encountered the term many years ago. They do have related etymology, however, from the Latin "perficio" meaning "to complete". The word seems to have evolved to its more common meaning in that something completed, or brought to full development, is presumed to be of high quality.

Spelunk!

I went caving with some friends this past weekend, and as we pondered a sign entitled "Speleology", one of them commented, "Don't you find it hard to believe that a word like 'spelunk' actually comes from, like, a Latin root?"

I did, so much so that I had to look it up (though the presence of the -ology suffix was a pretty good indication):

ETYMOLOGY:From obsolete spelunk, cave, from Middle English, from Old French spelunque, from Latin splunca, from Greek splunx.

But I also like the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip with the following dialogue:
Calvin: Want to go spelunking with me?
Hobbes: Spelunking? There aren't any caves around here!
Calvin: You don't need a cave. All you need is a rock. Spelunk!

False etymology

When I was in third grade, I had an argument with a classmate who insisted that "several" meant seven, i.e. if you had several shirts, you had exactly seven shirts. No doubt she got this from the similarity of the two words. I thought myself quite intelligent for being immune to such simplistic reasoning.

Lo and behold, it turns out I'm not. For years I've thought the word "triage", as used in emergencies with mass casualties, referred to the classification of victims into exactly three groups: those requiring immediate attention, those who could wait, and those who were beyond saving. Today, during the monthly training I attend as a member of the volunteer emergency response team at my company, I learned that the word actually comes from French trier, meaning "to sort." And, apparently, it can involve classification into more than three groups. Like my childhood friend, I was misled by what I thought was the prefix "tri-", which turns out not to be a prefix at all.

This misconception seems to be fairly common, as is indicated here.