By Alex Posa

I love English. I love how confusing it is and how quickly it can take on new words, like the entire poem “Jabberwocky.” I adore that there’s a word for nearly everything. Last year the Global Language Monitor announced we had surpassed 1,000,000 words. Most lexicographers and linguists dismissed this as poppycock, (a word that comes from the Dutch word pappekak which translates to soft dung) but the number of distinct words in the language still numbers at least in the mid-100,000’s. Most of all, I’m grateful for the fact that I’m lucky enough to speak the international language of business as a first language. I’ll acknowledge I’m not much of a reader. I’ll read books on political theory, but the last novel I completed was Notes from Underground last summer. This doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy novels. It only means I’ve lost my ability to concentrate for extended periods of time, thanks in no small part to television.

Last semester I wrote an article for a certain other publication on how people misuse language. I have to admit, I too make mistakes when speaking and writing the language that I love (which happens to be the only language I can speak well). For example, since I first heard the term “and/or” in elementary school I accepted it as a completely legitimate phrase. It turns out it’s not. When using “or” without “either” the possibility of choosing all of the above is implied. “You can have cherry pie, apple pie, or chocolate cake” means you can have any number of the given choices. “You can have either cherry pie, apple pie, or chocolate cake” means you can only choose one.

I still err and use “what” and “that” when I should say “which.” The word “what” should be used when the choices aren’t restricted and “which” when the choices are restricted. Going back to our pies and cakes, you should of course say, “what would like for dessert” not “which would you like for dessert.” When you add in the three choices, neither “what” nor “which” sound particularly awkward, but the correct choice is “which would you like, cherry pie, apple pie, or chocolate cake.”

Since I will never be a perfect grammertarian, I’ve moved to etymology. And oh boy, is learning word origins is an exciting pastime. Take the words used for a subject everyone loves, sex. The word vagina comes from Latin meaning sheath; in Latin penis means tail. For those of us not enjoying other people’s tails or sheaths, there is pornography. This term comes from the Greek pornographos, which breaks down to pornē, meaning prostitute and graphein, meaning write. Thus, ponographos is an adjective meaning writing about prostitutes. Another fun one is sodomy, which comes from the biblical cities, Sodom and Gomorrah. Sodom was the home of Lot, who offered up his two virgin daughters when a mob wanted to lay with the angels God sent to survey the two hellholes. After God turned Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt for the horrible crime of looking back at Sodom, his daughters started new tribe by getting their father drunk and having sex with him. And Lot was the most pious of all Sodom’s residents.

This brings us to the most vulgar of words, fuck, which has scores of incorrectly attributed origins. Most of which come from invented acronyms, like “Fornicating Under Consent of King” or “False Use of Carnal Knowledge.” The etymology is likely a bit more complicated and enigmatic than that.  It likely comes from the Dutch word, fokken, which means to breed, this is the extent of Merriam-Webster online dictionary’s etymology. The Oxford English Dictionary goes further, still coming from fokken but taking a different path. Fokken’s definition moves from “to mock” in 1400’s to “to strike” then “to fool,” eventually winding up as “to have sexual intercourse with” in 1657. However in 1772 it was defined as “to grow or cultivate.” The early modern German word ficken, meaning to rub, itch, scratch, may have also given rise to the current word. However, we will probably never know the true origins of fuck, that most beautiful of words.