Television Words

Most of the times, words come from my reading, but on rare occasions there is a word on television that attracts my attention, and even rarer on network television.

Incredibly, the show Two and a Half Men, a popular situation comedy that has degenerated into a puerile (and less humorous) show about sex and drugs, provided one of the words this week. A pedantic girlfriend of Alan’s teenage son Jake uses the word puerile, a surprisingly appropriate insertion into the script.

Puerile comes originally from the Latin word for boy, puer, and came to English from the French in the 1660s. The Latin word puerilis, meaning childlike, was (according to my dictionary) formed into the French word puéril. It was a short 20 years before the English word childlike developed the meaning of immature, juvenile or childish.

Another word, from the cancelled CBS show Numbers (now in reruns on cable), is constantly used by the central character in the series, Charlie Eppes. Charlie is a mathematician who often uses algorithms to solve cases for his FBI agent brother.

Algorithm is a mathematical term that my dictionary defines as “any special method of solving a certain kind of problem; specifically, the repetitive calculations used in finding the greatest common divisor of two numbers”, which is called Euclid’s algorithm. According to my dictionary, it is an altered form “(after ARITHMETIC) of algorism. An algorism isn’t something Al Gore said, it’s “the Arabic system of numerals; decimal system of counting, or the act or skill of computing with any kind of numerals.”

It came to English in the 1690s from the Middle English algorithme (those Middle English dolts are the ones who confused it with arithmetic) and the Old French word algorisme, which came from the Middle Latin word algorismus, which was formed (etymonline.com calls it a “mangled transliteration”) from the Arabic al-Khowarazmi, which literally means a native of Khwarazm, which of course you know is related to the surname of the 9th century “Baghdad mathematician Abu Ja'far Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi…[who wrote the] famous treatise on equations ("Kitab al-Jabr w'al-Muqabala" "Rules of Reintegration and Reduction"), which also introduced Arabic numerals to the West.” Boy, what a knee-slapper of a treatise that was!

One other word I’ve heard on television, albeit from political commentators who are allowed to use bigger words, is iconoclast. An iconoclast was originally anyone who opposed the religious use of images or advocated the destruction of such images, specifically a member of the group in the Orthodox Eastern Church in the 8th and 9th centuries who denounced the use of icons. Later it was used of the 16th and 17th century Protestants in the Netherlands who vandalized Catholic churches and destroyed their icons. It has since broadened its meaning to refer to a person who attacks or ridicules traditional or venerated institutions or ideas regarded by him as erroneous or based on superstition.

The word came to English in the 1590s from the French word iconoclaste, which they took from the Middle Latin word iconoclastes, which they got from the Late Greek word (or was it Middle Greek? The jury’s out.) eikonoklastes, formed from the Greek words for image (eikonos) and breaker (klastes). So while it passed through multiple languages, the idea of an iconoclast being an image breaker remains intact, something that can’t be said for many images.

Who knew that television could provide such esoteric, recondite, and abstruse information?