I just learned that "hippo" means "horse" and it's-
-blowing my goddamn mind.
Hey Sternal Journalists, welcome back.
Real quick: I'm on a show, The Entanglement, on Saturday at 9PM at Moving Arts Theater on Hyperion. I'll be doing a hot 10 with a mix of tried-n-true old material, and VERY untested who-knows-how-it'll-go new stuff.
Okay, back to it! I just learned this whole hippo thing from the blog Inky Fool. And it is wild.
Hippopotamus? That's a river horse.
Hippocampus? That's a seahorse! (Technically horse sea-monster, but it's the word they used for it). Because apparently it's shaped like a seahorse. It's gross, but look it up.
And I check out this blog Inky Fool regularly because it's written by a guy whose book I read regularly.
Now, I own a fair amount of books and I even read some of them, but very few of them do I read regularly.
This exception to that rule is a little yellow thing called ETYMOLOGICON. It's a breezy greatest hits of etymology written by Forsyth, who is a word-obsessed cheeky British writer and that is enough to keep me coming back.
I mean, that whole horse thing! Come on!
But for this week's Sternal Journal, I will lightly plagiarize Etymologicon to tell you my favorite etymological connection of all time, bracket and braggart.
Make your guesses now before reading...
and we're off!
Bracket! We know what it is. It's one of these things [ ]. It can also be something you lose while building Ikea furniture, which looks a lot like those things!
That's because bracket-the-punctuation was named after bracket-the-furniture-building-device (apparently, they're used in even more complex architecture than Ikea furniture, if there is such a thing).
Here's where it gets fun. Architectural brackets (originally spelled braggets, they were given the "bracket" spelling by John Smith of Disney's-Pocahontas-and-in-real-life-probably-did-some-fucked-up-shit-to-irl-Pocahontas fame in a nautical dictionary he wrote. We're not gonna plug his nautical dictionary here! He was a pretty bad guy!) got their name from-
Wanna guess?
Architectural brackets got their name from codpieces (groin armors)! Bet ya didn't guess that! You did? You've got a weird brain!
This is because architectural brackets have to fuse adjacent beams together, much like groin armor had to connect the chest armor to the leg armor.
Anyway, say you were a real douche on the battlefield and always showing off your groin armor (codpiece [bragget]).
Then you would be engaging in the French verb form of bragget, braguer, which became the word for flaunting or bragging. So the noun form, one engages in the verb of braguer, is a braggart.
So while it's unfortunate (though not entirely unexpected) that bragging has a toxically masculine etymological origin, I think it's great that linguistic natural selection has pulverized it's machismo and turned it into one of the most boring pieces of punctuation there is. (Oh, you're so proud of your codpiece? Sorry to tell you, it's been reduced to the understudy of the parentheses! [See, we only even needed it because I overwrote this paragraph]).
Anyway, don't take my word for it. Go pick up the book! Or at least check out the blog.
And quick, three things I couldn't help but enjoy this week were:
Baby Gravy 2: I'll be honest, your tastes probably have to really, really align with mine musically for you to enjoy this collaboration album between Minnesota rapper Yung Gravy and Canadian rapper bbno$ (pron. "Baby no money"), but I listened to it 3 times, so--
Timequake: I finally finished reading this weird Kurt Vonnegut book-about-a-book-slash-memoir and I loved every second of it. This may sound wacky if you haven't read it, but I feel like he has a pessimist's brain which he chooses to use for optimism. He very deftly points out a lot of the shit that's universally wrong in the world, but he also has clear ideas about how and why we should still believe in humanity. And that's pretty nice. I'm already questioning my decision to place Baby Gravy 2 above it.
Atypical Season 3: I love this show. It's a pretty straightforward dramedy about Sam Gardner, an 18-year-old on the spectrum, and his family. It has a lot of heart, it's funny, and even though it can be fluffy at times, everyone acts the shit out of it, and I really appreciate that. I think they could really get away with phoning it in and still having a successful tv show, so I love that everyone still goes for it. Including the dad, Michael Rapaport, which--what more do you need?!
(My one issue is that this season had a track-and-field heavy storyline that culminated in the slowest 100-meter race I've ever seen getting attention from UCLA's top-tier D1 track program. They weren't even wearing spikes, come on.) Still, highly recommend. Even better than Bad Boys 2 and the Zapruder film.
Alright, that's all! Get goin, have a good day! Enjoy the rest of your weekend!
Love,
Julian
P.S. For reading this far, here's a picture of a cookie dough cookie sandwich.