Transcript
The following transcript was automatically generated and may contain errors in spelling and/or grammar. It is provided for assistance in note-taking and review.
Come on, come on, big money. Yeah. All right. Pat, give me a Q. No Q. Huh. How about a W? No W. Hey guys, you’re gonna watch me win big. I’m on Wheel of Fortune. I’ve been waiting my whole life to play this game, and I’m glad you guys are here to watch this. I’ve got a strategy, actually. To win this game, you gotta pick the right letters. You need a word, so your word’s gonna be letter, and I’m gonna go back to picking the right letters, and I’m gonna win a lot of money. Pat, could I have an X? (buzzer) No X. Hm, gotta try to guess the word. –It’s Word Up, the vocab show, starring Dwane Thomas. Word Up teaches you the Latin and Greek roots countless English words. Use them to amaze your friends and family members. Now sit back and enjoy the show. W and Q are the letters he chose. I got a letter for that guy. L, which stands for loser. And also he’s going to lose that game. If he won, we could all retire. We wouldn’t even have to do this anymore. Now that I wouldn’t want to stop doing this, hey everyone, welcome to Word Up, the show where you learn English words that come from Latin and Greek.
Let’s go now to the Latin guy that also starts with L and see what he’s got for us. And letter and lame. We need a new guy to do the intros because that guy is lame. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Hey everyone, the Latin word for letter is litera and from it we get all these English words. Some of them you probably already know. The first one is literature. When we’re talking about literature, we’re talking about the classics. We’re talking about the books or plays or stories that have stood the test of time. You probably knew that, but there’s a second word, The second meaning for the word literature, and that is the written material on a particular subject. So let’s say you are in college and you go on a summer dig with an archaeologist, and you guys are digging around, and he asks you, have you read the literature on these people that we’re studying here? He’s asking, have you read the written material about this subject? It’s not necessarily the literature that has withstood the test of time. So kind of two different meanings. If you can read, then you possess something called literacy. Or people might say you are literate. That means you can read. If you can’t read, then you possess illiteracy, or you are illiterate. And this comes from the Latin prefix in, which means not. And when the in, in, in, bumped into the L in litera. This often happens in Latin. It will, the in will change to whatever the next consonant is. So inliterate became illiterate, and we have a double L in English. It’s called assimilation. It’s pretty common. That’s where illiteracy and illiterate come from. There’s another word called alliterate that this English word means you can read, you know how to read, but you just have no interest in it, and you don’t want to, so you don’t. You are alliterate. This comes from the Greek prefix, a, which means not, and litera, meaning letter. Mark Twain famously said something like, “Those who possess the ability to read but don’t “are no better than those who can’t.” he was referencing illiterate people and illiterate people. Okay, the next two words, probably not words you’ve encountered before, but I like them, they’re pretty cool, are literati and illiterati. Kind of sounds like the supposedly secret society, the Illuminati, that runs the world. Some people believe that there’s a small group of people in a secret society that run the world called the Illuminati. I don’t know. They made me say that. Anyway, the literati are the people who are well-educated. They are knowledgeable in literature. They can read. They’re not illiterate. The illiterati are people who are uneducated or not well-educated. Okay, so far we’ve been talking about literary words. Literary means well-read or knowledgeable. And we actually use this word mostly as an adjective and we stick it in front of other words. So for example, you may get together with your friends for a literary discussion. You’re getting together to talk about certain literature. Or if you’re an author and you wanna talk to a publisher, you, I suppose, could go talk directly to the publisher, but that’s generally not how it works. Usually you would hire a literary agent and this person would go between the two of you and negotiate for you. Alliteration comes from the Latin word ar, which means to or toward, and litera, which means letter. It is a literary device that shows up in poetry and it shows up in tongue twisters. It’s a series of words that all start with the same consonant. So a series of words, for example, that all start with the letter P, as in Peter Piper picked a peck heck of pickled peppers.
Ha ha, I can never get that. But I did. That was alliteration. The next word is obliterate, which usually we think– when we say the word obliterate, we automatically think destruction. So a complete obliteration of an enemy. But it actually comes from this Latin word litera, meaning letter, and the prefix ob, which means against or in the place of. Ob can actually mean quite a few things, it’s a preposition. But in this case, let’s think of it as against. So you’re against the letter. To obliterate someone is to eliminate them from the written record. So this happens sometimes in the Roman Empire when a Roman emperor would take over and he didn’t like the previous Roman emperor at all. So he would obliterate this guy’s name from the record. He would actually send out teams of people who would remove his name from official inscriptions on buildings. That’s obliteration, to remove someone’s name from the record. And the last one is transliterate. Trans in Latin, as you know from previous episodes, means across. Literate means letter. So to transliterate is to transfer letters across, kind of. Transliteration is when you write in your own language, but you use a different alphabet. So this shows up in Julius Caesar’s book, The Gallic Wars, when the Romans invade ancient France, the ancient people there, who were called Gauls at the time, they’re actually communicating with each other between tribes, and they don’t want the Romans to know what they’re saying. So if their letters fall into Roman hands, they want to trick the Romans. So what they did was they wrote in their own language, but they wrote using Greek letters. So it added an extra layer of confusion in case the Romans intercepted the writing. You could do this. You could write messages to your friends and use the Greek alphabet, but still you’re writing in English, just using a Greek alphabet. And if anybody intercepts your letters, they won’t be able to read it because you’re transliterating. Okay, that’s it for English words that come from litera. And I’m gonna send you back over to my friend at the desk. Hmm, that makes a lot of sense actually. That puts a lot of pieces together that I’ve been wondering about. I think Dwane is a member of the illiterati. That’s why he can’t spell. That’s why he’s not doing so well on “Wheel of Fortune.” Hmm. All right, over to you, Greek guy. You think he’s in? You think he’s a member of the Illiterati? I don’t know, I’m concerned. That’s a concern to me. I think we should look for someone new. Hey, everyone, the Greek word for letter is grama, which the Greeks pronounce grama, and from it, we get all these English words. The first one is grammar. I know, I know, your favorite subject. Grammar is the subject that deals with the rules of a language. The spelling, the punctuation, the syntax, how you put sentences together, not cities together, totally different subject. Anyway, that’s grammar. Someone who studies grammar professionally or teaches grammar is a grammarian. Or you might even hear the term a grammar maven. Maven is a Yiddish word that means expert. After we’re done with Word Up, we’re doing visual Yiddish. Just kidding, not really. The next word is actually a suffix. This is the ending gram, which comes from grama, and it means something written, or something produced, or the report. And we’ve already talked about it in diagram and sonogram, but now we’re gonna add gram to a bunch of other English words. And the first one is anagram. Ana in Greek means up or back, and we add gram to the end to create the word enneagram and the etymology doesn’t really help with the meaning. An enneagram is a word that can be rearranged, all the letters can be rearranged to create a new word or phrase. So for example, you can take the word dormitory, which is a room in a college, and mix it up to create the word or the phrase dirty room, which sometimes happens in a dormitory.
Or you can take the phrase the eyes and mix it up to create the sentence, they see, using all the same letters. That’s an anagram. An angiogram, angiogram and cardiogram are the next words and they’re medical words. An angiogram comes from the Greek word an angion, which means vessel. An angiogram is actually an X-ray of your blood vessels. So if the doctor suspects that you have an issue with your blood vessels and he wants to look at them, he’ll actually inject into your body a radioactive dye and then take an x-ray of it to get the picture, the angiogram, so he can figure out what’s wrong with you. The next word is cardiogram. Cardiogram comes from the Greek word cardio, which means heart and grama meaning letter. This is actually a report on the rhythm of your heart. It’s a report on your heartbeat. The doctor will, if he wants to analyze your heartbeat, he’ll call in a technician who will hook you up to a cardiograph machine. You may remember grafo. We talked about way back in a previous episode. Grafo in Greek means I write. Well, this machine is going to write something and it’s going to deliver a report called a cardiogram. Then the doctor can take a look at it and determine if he needs to help you. The next word is epigram. It comes from epi, which means on or upon, but it also, in Greek it turned into epigrammata, which means inscription. If you think about inscribing something on a building or a tombstone or a rock, you don’t want it to be very long. You want it to get to the point quickly, right? Well, that’s what an epigram does. An epigram is a statement or a poem that is quick, short, to the point. Yeah, it’s fast. So for example, youth is wasted on the young. That’s a famous epigram. It’s quickly, to the point, gets the message across right away. Another one is, if you don’t have anything nice to say, then don’t say anything at all. Nice, quick, short, to the point message. Or as my grandmother used to say, if you don’t have anything nice to say, come and sit by me. So that would be a funny epigram. A monogram from the Greek word monos, meaning one, and grama, meaning letter, is a combination of multiple letters into one. It’s usually done in a very artistic fashion. So you might take the initials of your name, for example, and run the three initials, your first, middle name, and last name. You run those three initials in together and create a new letter, which is just an artistic representation of the three. That’s a monogram. Companies do this, people do this. You inscribe them or embroider them on shirts and pillows, towels. You see monograms all the time. The next word is telegram. And this is actually an old technology. In the 1850s, someone came up with the telegraph machine. There’s that word grafo again. Grafo means I write. And a telegraph machine was a way to get messages quickly across long distances. It comes from the Greek word tili, meaning far away. You see tili in telephone, sound from far away, telescope, to see something from far away. Well, telegram is a letter from far away. So they would send the message through these telegraph machines, and the message you got was the telegram. That was the message from far away. You don’t really see that word as much anymore, although it is hidden in a very popular social media site called Instagram. The creators of Instagram wanted this idea that you could send something from far away quickly, digitally, and it was predominantly a photograph site. So you could send quickly photos of yourself to friends all over the world. So they took the words instant, camera, and telegram and ran them all together to create Instagram. There you go, my friends, all those words from the Greek word for letter, grama. I’m gonna send you now back over to my friend at the desk. All right, ha ha, actually works. Thanks, Greek guy, while you were doing that, I was actually making my own anagram. Check it out, huh? If we rearrange Dwane’s name, who we know now is a member of the Illiterati, He can’t spell. You can turn his name into new ad. Yeah, we need some new help around here, and we’re looking for a replacement for him. So while you’re out there impressing friends with your 20 new words, if you spot someone who’s looking for a job who is blondish, mid-40s, knows Latin and Greek, doesn’t mind traveling, give us a call, ’cause we’re looking for someone to replace this guy, who I’m convinced is a member of the Illiterati. Thanks for being here, guys. See you next time.