Reading is a beautiful thing. With it we can travel to different worlds with incredible characters stretching our imagination. We can learn new things and some of us can read the same story again and again without ever getting tired of it. There is no doubt that reading has shaped history. Classic stories like the Great Gatsby, Moby Dick, and Huckleberry Fin. Even older still we see Shakespeare who shaped history with this plays. Beyond this even still, and perhaps the greatest example of reading shaping history is of course the sacred texts, The Holy Bible, Quran, The Tanach and many more. These texts shape the history of mankind, but when we look closer it is rather evident, at least I hope so, that these texts are made up from words.
The selection of words and their place within a text can be extremely powerful. This is not what I am interested in though, some words have amazing history of their own, a history I would love to uncover.
Let us begin with the word “berserk”. Nowadays when someone is going berserk they can also be described as ‘freaking out’ but the origins of the word have a much more aggressive interpretation. The word berserk comes from the Nordic people or vikings. This word was used to described a war-crazed warrior that fueled by the desire for bloodshed (and some argue the occasional hallucinogen) would go into battle without armor and kill a unbelievable number of people.
Secondly lets consider the conjugation of the word Octopus. While some would be quick to argue that the simple solution is that the plural is simply octupi you would be wrong. Octopi insinuates that this word is of Latin decent which some would argue it is, those people would again be wrong because in reality this word is ‘Latan-ized’ from the Greek word ‘oktopous’. There is a fierce argument over this plural with some arguing that because of its use in the English language it should follow English words which would leave us with octopuses or octopi. Perhaps I won’t uncover the mystery of this conjugation in this one post but maybe you will develop an opinion of your own.
These words are examples of words with a great history or mystery attached to them. These words have unique histories which tell a story within themselves. Who knew that it was possible to tell an entire story with just one word.