Word Origins

I've always been fond of words; something I get from my mother. I like to write, play scrabble, do crossword puzzles - well you get the picture. A few years ago I volunteered for a literacy program in California where I lived at the time. My first students were two Korean ladies. They had lived in Orange County for more than a decade and had a good grasp of the language, but lived in a Korean neighborhood so they rarely got the chance to speak English. What I learned was that English is a super complicated language. Imagine trying to get someone to understand why the O sound in to and go are pronounced differently. Or what's the difference between to, too and two, or there, their and they're. Grasping sarcastic humor is an altogether different challenge. Last night on Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader, a question was which of these words was a palindrome: jumbo shrimp, cuckoo, race car. For those of you who don't know or can't remember the answer is race car. A palindrome is a word that is spelled the same forward and backward. Jumbo shrimp is an oxymoron - a word that contradicts, and cuckoo is an onomatopoeia -a word that when said makes the sound of what it is. I have a tendency to wonder where we get slang words from. Who invented them and why? For example, how did we get the word pussy from vagina? It doesn't look like a cat to me. I can understand calling it a pink taco because of the obvious resemblance. Or how did dick come to mean penis? Here to I can understand calling it a wiener because of the resemblance. How did car come to mean automobile? These kinds of things can drive a word person batty. Thanks to my co-worker, Holly, I learned how fornication became fuck. It's an acronym for fornication under consent of the king. Can you imagine if we nowadays had to ask the president if we could 'do it?' Strange language we have. And while I'm at it. Wiener is wIener not the other way around. And when a person asks you how you are, the correct answer is 'I am well, not I am good. And the word is pronounced just like it's spelled - library NOT libarry. People who mispronounce that word shouldn't even be allowed to enter the library. Yea, yea, I know it's snobby of me but too fornicating bad.