Lexicon
Man and language
Deepti

Tongue twisters are one way of improving speech. Palindromes are another such route. Palindrome is the Greek word for ‘running backward’ and it does exactly that; it will read the same whether read backward or forward. While ‘Madam I’m Adam’ and ‘Able was I ere I saw Elba’ are the common ones, there are many unusual ones such as ‘Evil did I dwell; lewd did I live’, ‘Do geese see God?’ and ‘Never odd or even’.

Humans have always been preoccupied with the future and all it holds; words that take on fresh hues while retaining these concerns reveal the universality of men at all times. ‘Fatal’ was used earlier in the sense of ‘decreed by fate’; it came from the Latin ‘fatalis’ or ‘decreed by fate’ that itself can be traced to ‘fatum’ or ‘that which has been spoken’. By and by, this word came to mean ‘ominous’ and was modified to ‘fatalite’ in French where it denoted the quality of causing death or disaster, leading to today’s ‘fatality’.

Past experience shows that most new words or new use of old words can be traced to four sources. One, the growth of science and technology means finding names for new things. Internet is a good example here as its expansion and development has led to many new entrants like software, freeware, broadband and tweeting.

Two, onomatopoeia accounts for many words because as human experience grows, sounds also increase in number, leading to new creations to cover them, for instance, ‘frrunch’ to describe the crunch emitted when you bite into a well-cooled food item.

Three, brand names create many new words. Old ones like Xerox, band-aid and scotch tape are common enough; now we have words like IPod and Xbox too. And, four, domain names like Facebook, Yahoo and Google are commonplace today.

The word ‘transpire’ comes from the Latin where it means ‘to become known’ so the sentence ‘It transpired that he returned home as he couldn’t get a seat on the plane’ is correct but not ‘It transpired that he returned home’.