The Grammarian befriending a pachyderm. Photo by Mary Walton

By Charles Layton

Today’s word is “ramify,” meaning to divide into branches, from the Latin ramus (branch). That’s what it says on one of my favorite websites, wordsmith.org.

This website is run by Anu Garg, a writer and computer consultant who lives beside a lake somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. Each day he features a different word, for which he provides its definition and some interesting commentary.

Also, he throws in a daily random quote, which he calls “A thought for today.” This morning’s thought, for instance, was from James Baldwin: “Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”

This little website claims nearly a million linguaphile (i.e., word nerd) subscribers in at least 200 countries. It’s been up and running since 1994. It’s been written up in the New York Times and elsewhere.

Mr. Garg has become an established authority. People write in with questions, such as the following:

From Mary at worldbank.org:

I  was wondering if you might be able to help me. I have recently started to date a special man. The problem is that I am uncomfortable calling him my “boyfriend” because he isn’t a boy (and I’ve always hated that word anyway; it’s sophomoric). I looked up “boyfriend” in Microsoft Word’s thesaurus but the alternatives are equally unacceptable. Please, please, please, is there a word out there that indicates a close, romantic relationship without being too sappy (or too explicit)? If you can suggest one, I would be forever grateful!

Here is Garg’s answer:

Dear Mary,

I suggest “priya” (pronounced PRI-ya). This unisex word comes from Sanskrit, isn’t sappy, and conveys that unique sense of affection which forms the essense of a relationship.

You can see the level this guy is operating on.

I usually just read the word of the day and then move on, but this morning, having time to kill, I started following some of the comment strings in this website’s extensively rich archives.

I stumbled on a great conversation about the difference between a rug and a carpet. It began with this, from a reader: I tend to think of a carpet as covering more space than a rug. But the dictionaries give them as synonyms.

Then Fiberbabe posted this response: Yeah, I think of carpet as having that wall-to-wall quality, whereas a rug just covers a portion of the floor … throw rug, area rug, mug rug 🙂 … no one I know would ever say “throw carpet.”

But then Jheem filed this dissenting opinion: If a carpet goes from wall to wall, why would anybody talk about wall-to-wall carpeting? Or an area rug? Also, there used to be talk about a flying carpet, not a flying rug. You get called onto the carpet, but have the rug pulled out from under yourself. Carpet is from Latin/Italian and rug is from Scandinavian.

See how educational? Here are a few other things Wordsmith.org taught me today:

• The expression “ring true” comes from the old practice of judging a coin to be genuine or fake by the sound it gives when tapped. That practice became obsolete when coins stopped being made of precious metals, but the idiom lives on.
• All elephants are pachyderms, but not all pachyderms are elephants; the rhinoceros and hippopotamus have also been classified as such. The word means thick-skinned, and you may apply it as well to a thick-skinned, insensitive, stolid person. (Which seems unfair to something as fundamentally inoffensive as an elephant.)
• The disease we call cancer comes from the Greek word for “crab” because the ancient physician Galen thought the spreading lesions of a malignant tumor looked like crab’s claws.
• The word apocalypse, meaning revelation, comes from the Greek word meaning to uncover. But — surprise! — so does the word eucalyptus. It literally means “well-covered.” (Wondering whether the word calypso might also be related, I looked it up elsewhere online. Alas, no connection whatsoever.)

I also ran across a quotation in which one of O. Henry’s characters misunderstands the term solar plexus. “‘His arm,’ said Chad, ‘is harder’n a diamond. He interduced me to what he called a shore-perpluxus punch and ’twas like being kicked twice by a mustang.”

And, finally, let’s conclude with this down-to-earth observation on language by Oliver Wendell Holmes: “I would never use a long word where a short one would answer the purpose. I know there are professors in this country who ‘ligate’ arteries. Other surgeons only tie them, and it stops the bleeding just as well.”