Way Words Walked

Vocabulary, spellings and pronunciation were the three areas where I was dreadful at school. But despite of that, I always managed to get average grades thanks to maths and science. This set-up worked perfectly all the way through the high school and the engineering college, but I met with serious trouble when I started preparing for competitive exams which had substantial sections on English and cracking them meant having a good hand at all the aspects of English. It was then that I seriously started thinking about improving my vocabs. Mugging had never being my cup of tea, so found a better way to learn words. The strategy was simple: Learn the words logically or learn how they originated. In short, I decided to be an etymologist, at least an amateurish one. This might sound crazy for the reader(if anybody reads it), but believe me its a real cool way to learn words.

First of all it's amusing to hear the story each word has to tell. A story which may be spanning across decades or even centuries of the history. Let me share some of the interesting ones with you. Synonymously an orthopedician means a doctor who treats ailments related to bones, while entymologically it tells a different story. Orthopedician is made by the combination of 3 Latin words orthos ,paedos and ician. Here orthos means staightening, paedos means children and ician means an expert. Read together, an orthopedician is a expert in straightening kids - oh isn't that the teachers and parents do ? Then we should call them all orthopedicians. Now for the history ! This word was coined in the early sixteenth century when a large number of children was born with spinal cord ailments. These spine ailments were so common that there was a group of people specialising in straightening the spine of these infants. It was these people who were called as child straighteners. But I think these guys ran out of business soon and had to eventually expand their area of expertise to all the ailments related to human bone. But they went on using their old title even after their evolution.
We all talk about addiction. Addiction towards TV, junk food, cigars, booze etc etc etc. Addiction is derived from a Latin word dictus meaning to speak. Addiction etymologically means "unable to say no" and this is exactly what happens with all the addicts, they just cant say "no" to the addiction.
Another interesting story these words had was about the aversion of the people in early period towards left-handers. Words synonymous to left hand like sinister and gauche is synonymous to evil and awkward now( remember gaucherrie) and words which meant "right-hand" means gifted and tactful now(of course adroit). It would have been really painful or even deadly for left -handers in that era.
Have you ever wondered how the symbol of pounds is lb? This is another etymological relationship, the pound lb is actually Libra , do I ring any bells ? Yes, the symbol of the sun sign Libra is also a balance. Libra means weight or pound in Latin which is why it is the representation for a unit of weight.

Hope this one sounded interesting for all of you.