Sit and Spin

The Consumerist is, for the most part, reliably amusing, but their writers have an on-again-off-again relationship with little things like spelling and grammar, unfortunately.

Here's a story about a gym in New York which subjected its paying customers to promotional videos for a movie, which sounds like a fairly unpleasant experience: it's not just being forced to watch commercials during a fitness class, it's the music, which in a spinning class (a high-powered stationary-bike workout), as in any other kind of group fitness class, has to match the mood and tempo of the exercises but in this case was just inappropriate movie music. A wit from The Consumerist made some calls to branches of the gym, and ended up saying things like this:

I like Venom, he's pretty scary. You got to watch out for him in the new one. My favorite Spiderman comic was the one where people went to the gym and they thought they were going to exercise and instead like they got subjected to a marketing campaign and then they went out to the movie like zombies.

That? Funny.

This? Not so much.

There's no head of incidious marketing campaign that-

Were they thinking of "incident" or "incite" when they came up with that spelling? And why didn't they have their spellchecker turned on? I'm a really good speller and I wouldn't think of not using it, because little errors have a way of creeping in when you type quickly. If you're not a good speller, it just doesn't make any sense to eschew it.

"Insidious" is the correct word, and based on the spelling, I found myself wondering if it might be a descendent of "inside". Because, I reasoned, an insidious idea is one that gets inside your head and won't go away....

Nah. "Insidious" is from, of course, Latin: "in-" which means what it says, plus "sedere", "to sit", which gives us such words as "sedate" and "supersede", which is another word that the spellchecker will flag if you spell it incorrectly, which, if you are like most people, you will. Dictionary.com's first definition for "insidious" is "intended to entrap or beguile", and the origin of "insidious" was "insidia", "an ambush", because you sit around and wait for your prey to come along and then you grab it.

"Inside", on the other hand, doesn't come from "sedere" at all (although honestly, wouldn't you think it might?). It comes instead, reasonably enough, from "in" and "side" (an incredibly old word, descending from Norse tongues and dating from the early days of the English language), because when you're on one side of a wall enclosing something, you're either on the in side or the out side.