Free Association
I was reading a fascinating New Yorker article when I ran across the intensely irritating phrase "software program".
It's not quite redundant, but it's very, very close. For all intents and purposes, software is a program. It isn't always: sometimes software is a set of instructions or subroutines. But in day-to-day life, for just about everybody just about all of the time, any software they encounter is going to be a program, and so the two words are interchangeable. "Software program" (sometimes "software application," which is just as redundant--an application is a program) is one word too many. It's even worse than the annoying but relatively benign "tuna fish". (As opposed to, say, "tuna cattle", one must assume.) A quick Googling indicates that more than a few people felt it necessary to cover all the bases by using the multiply redundant phrase "software application program", which is like saying "book tome volume".
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Elsewhere in the article, which is about medicine, was the word "coronary", and suddenly it occurred to me that I couldn't see what the heart had to do with a tiara, all those mildly alarming chromolithographs of Jesus exposing his heart engirdled by a crown of thorns notwithstanding. Because, as I knew, "corona" is the root of the word "crown" (it comes to us from the French "couronne"), but what does that have to do with the human heart? It turns out that anatomically, a corona is a collection of like things radiating outwards, as (I must assume) the arteries and blood vessels radiate outwards from the heart, and so the adjectival ending "-ry" was attached to "corona" to describe these arteries. A "coronary infarction" was a blockage of these blood vessels leading to a heart attack, which in time simply came to be called, with notable brevity, a coronary. ("Infarction", in case you were interested, is from the word "infarct", any area of tissue that has died due to lack of a blood supply; it comes from the Latin word "infarcire", which means "to cram". Why? Because an infarct is caused when a blood clot gets crammed into the blood supply.)
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Back when I was studying to become a fitness instructor--I've held quite a few jobs over the years, for some reason--I had to learn the Latin names of large number of the muscles in the human body. I discovered that anyone with even a smattering of Latin would have an easy time of this task, because far from being randomly difficult, the muscles are given extremely pragmatic names--names which describe the shape or location or other salient physical feature of the muscle. Latissimus dorsi: the broadest muscle in the back ("lati-" as in "latitude", which is to say "breadth", "-issim-" which I knew from Italian to mean "most", and "dors-" as in "dorsal fin", the one on the back of a fish or a shark). Biceps brachii: the two-headed muscle in the arm ("bi-" meaning "two", "-ceps" meaning "head", as in "cephalopod" or even "cephalogenic", and "brach-" meaning "arm").
Naturally, being a massive geek, I wasn't content to merely learn the muscles involved in fitness, and so I studied quite a few more. My favourite was the grandly named corrugator supercilii: it's the muscle that creates vertical wrinkles (that's the corrugator part) in the forehead by bringing the eyebrows (that's the supercilii part) downwards and inwards.
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"Supercilii", of course, brings to mind the word "supercilious", and why wouldn't it? They're the same word. "Supercilium", as I noted, refers to the eyebrow: "super-", "above", and "cilium", "eyelid". (And anyone who took high-school biology will recall that cilia--the plural of "cilium"--are little hairs, which if I'm not mistaken is a perfect example of synecdoche in action, the part standing in for the whole.) And a supercilious look is one that involves the raising of the eyebrows: not the wide-eyed full-brow lift that indicates surprise or shock, but the kind that raises only the inner part of the eyebrows. It helps to pair this with a little smirk.
It's not quite redundant, but it's very, very close. For all intents and purposes, software is a program. It isn't always: sometimes software is a set of instructions or subroutines. But in day-to-day life, for just about everybody just about all of the time, any software they encounter is going to be a program, and so the two words are interchangeable. "Software program" (sometimes "software application," which is just as redundant--an application is a program) is one word too many. It's even worse than the annoying but relatively benign "tuna fish". (As opposed to, say, "tuna cattle", one must assume.) A quick Googling indicates that more than a few people felt it necessary to cover all the bases by using the multiply redundant phrase "software application program", which is like saying "book tome volume".
+
Elsewhere in the article, which is about medicine, was the word "coronary", and suddenly it occurred to me that I couldn't see what the heart had to do with a tiara, all those mildly alarming chromolithographs of Jesus exposing his heart engirdled by a crown of thorns notwithstanding. Because, as I knew, "corona" is the root of the word "crown" (it comes to us from the French "couronne"), but what does that have to do with the human heart? It turns out that anatomically, a corona is a collection of like things radiating outwards, as (I must assume) the arteries and blood vessels radiate outwards from the heart, and so the adjectival ending "-ry" was attached to "corona" to describe these arteries. A "coronary infarction" was a blockage of these blood vessels leading to a heart attack, which in time simply came to be called, with notable brevity, a coronary. ("Infarction", in case you were interested, is from the word "infarct", any area of tissue that has died due to lack of a blood supply; it comes from the Latin word "infarcire", which means "to cram". Why? Because an infarct is caused when a blood clot gets crammed into the blood supply.)
+
Back when I was studying to become a fitness instructor--I've held quite a few jobs over the years, for some reason--I had to learn the Latin names of large number of the muscles in the human body. I discovered that anyone with even a smattering of Latin would have an easy time of this task, because far from being randomly difficult, the muscles are given extremely pragmatic names--names which describe the shape or location or other salient physical feature of the muscle. Latissimus dorsi: the broadest muscle in the back ("lati-" as in "latitude", which is to say "breadth", "-issim-" which I knew from Italian to mean "most", and "dors-" as in "dorsal fin", the one on the back of a fish or a shark). Biceps brachii: the two-headed muscle in the arm ("bi-" meaning "two", "-ceps" meaning "head", as in "cephalopod" or even "cephalogenic", and "brach-" meaning "arm").
Naturally, being a massive geek, I wasn't content to merely learn the muscles involved in fitness, and so I studied quite a few more. My favourite was the grandly named corrugator supercilii: it's the muscle that creates vertical wrinkles (that's the corrugator part) in the forehead by bringing the eyebrows (that's the supercilii part) downwards and inwards.
+
"Supercilii", of course, brings to mind the word "supercilious", and why wouldn't it? They're the same word. "Supercilium", as I noted, refers to the eyebrow: "super-", "above", and "cilium", "eyelid". (And anyone who took high-school biology will recall that cilia--the plural of "cilium"--are little hairs, which if I'm not mistaken is a perfect example of synecdoche in action, the part standing in for the whole.) And a supercilious look is one that involves the raising of the eyebrows: not the wide-eyed full-brow lift that indicates surprise or shock, but the kind that raises only the inner part of the eyebrows. It helps to pair this with a little smirk.
posted by pyramus | 5:37 AM
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