Cephalogenic

or, stuff that I dragged out of my head

Name:
Location: Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada

Sunday, December 11, 2005

Muscle

Breaking bones for your viewing pleasure.

The worst typos, probably, are the kind that you aren't initially sure are typos, that make a sort of sense in the context if you think about them really hard. Eventually you decide that, yes, they are typos, but by then you've wasted a bunch of time that could have been avoided if a writer or editor had done his job. (Like "glowering" here.)

If you like looking at strapping rugby players, then this DVD is probably right up your alley, and if you like typos, then the back of the box will also do nicely. Here's the suspect sentence:

And for those of you who are also looking to appreciate the physics of 12 handsome men...well there is plenty of that too.

They could have used a couple of commas, but we'll let that pass. The oddity is, of course, the word "physics". If you overthink it, you end up thinking, "Well, there is a certain amount of physics to rugby, so maybe that's what they're talking about...." But you know, deep down inside, that they really mean "physiques".

Now, it should be immediately evident that "physics" and "physiques" are related (along with "physical", "physician" and also "physic", which is "a medicine, particularly a cathartic"). But how are all these disparate words related to one another?

Through Greek, unsurprisingly. "Phusikos" is the Greek word for "of nature", and that's all we need to know to tie all these words together: I'm sure you can connect the dots yourself. ("Physique" is obviously French: it got the "-y-" from Latin and then generously gave us the whole thing. "Physics", though, we took directly from Latin.)

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home