I Get Around

Scrapbooking is, as you might guess, the making of scrapbooks, but not like kids do: it's expensive and insanely detailed and I suppose I don't really get it, because I don't even own a camera, and it seems like these scrapbookers spend a lot more time making their scrapbook pages than they do actually experiencing the events they're immortalizing, but whatever, it keeps them off the streets.

Scrapbooking is all about cutting things out and so there's a device called the Cricut, pronounced "cricket", which is actually sort of cool even though it has a pretty awful name (the company has another, similar, lower-end device called the Cuttlebug, which is a much, much worse name).

The name "Cricut" came to mind because I was reading the comments to a Consumerist posting and someone misspelled "circuit" as "circut", which, given the accepted pronunciation of "circuit", is a perfectly understandable mistake, and comment boxes don't contain built-in spellcheckers so if you're not a naturally good speller you're not going to catch it.

"Circuit" struck me as an interesting word in its own right, because even though it starts with "circ-", and every single word in English that contains those four letters in that order comes from Latin "circum-", "around", including such useful oddities as "circinate", "ring-shaped", it's not immediately obvious where the rest of the word comes from, which turns out to be the Latin verb "ire", "to go", so "circuit" is pretty much exactly the same as "circumference" ("circum-" plus "-ferre", "to carry"), and simply and literally means "to go around".