Transcript
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Hey guys, can you help me carry some of this stuff? How am I gonna pick that up? (sighs) Hey guys, looking for a word. Came to the grocery store, they didn’t have any shopping carts, so I get to carry all of this stuff. Or figure out how to pick it up and carry it. Carrie, take that word to the guy at the desk while I figure out how to pick the rest of this stuff up and carry it out of here without a shopping cart.
Hey guys, can you give me a hand? Oh, oh come on.–[MUSIC] Lena, aisle 12. –It’s Word Up, the vocab show, starring Dwane Thomas. Word Up teaches you the Latin and Greek roots of countless English words. Use them to amaze your friends and family members. Now sit back and enjoy the show. whole grain brown rice, long grain brown rice, sesame seeds, there’s nothing in here that tastes good. Why would you eat this stuff? Did you see what he was buying at the store? It was all health food. Health food doesn’t taste good. It’s because it’s missing all the delicious stuff. It says right here, free from over 125 artificial ingredients. The artificial ingredients make it taste good. Suppose if you dipped them in chocolate, would eat them but I don’t know. Hey, hey guys welcome back to Word Up. See all the stuff that guy was carrying? That’s your word actually, carry. Let’s go see what the Latin guy has to say about carrying things around. Guys check this out the Latin word porto means I carry and man I’m glad I don’t have to do what the Greek guy has to do because my words are so much easier. The first one is portable. Something portable is carryable. Your books are portable, your shoes are portable, your computer is even portable if you’re carrying a laptop. I grew up in the 80s, back then computers weren’t portable, they were huge, but they’re portable now. Your phones are portable. Anyway, easy word. The next word, import, comes from in in Latin which means, wait for it, in, and porto which means I carry. If you import something, you’re bringing it in. We don’t use this to talk about you bringing some soup into your room while you’re doing your homework. We talk about this when we’re talking about countries bringing in goods or materials. For example, America imports a lot of chocolate and coffee from other parts of the world. The opposite of import is export. Ex means out of, porto means carry. So America imports lots of chocolate and coffee, which I’m all in favor of, and we export entertainment. When I was growing up, I grew up overseas, and we always wanted to watch movies from America because we liked them better. America exports a lot of entertainment. If you are visiting another country and they give you permission to come on in and stay for a while, In Europe, the standard time is 90 days.
So France says, “Come on in, stay for 90 days.” And you decide, “I like France so much, “I’m staying for 150 days.” You’ll get in trouble and you might get deported. De in Latin means from or away from, emphasis on the away from, and porto meaning carry. You’ll be carried away from France and you’ll be told you can’t come back here anymore or you can’t come back here for a while. You have been deported because you broke our rules. This is to forcibly remove somebody from a country. Transport is to carry a cross. Trans in Latin means cross, porto means carry. You can transport things from one town to the next town, from one city to the next city, from one state to the next state.
You can even transport things from your house to the storage unit. Transport means to carry something across. You’re usually carrying something. You gotta have something. We use it a lot when we’re talking about transporting goods from one location to another. Report comes from the Latin prefix re, which means back or again, and porto meaning carry. Keep that in mind when we talk about report. Let’s say a reporter goes out and she sees what’s happening in the world, and she comes back and she tells us what she saw, and she brings us a story about what she saw.
She’s reporting back to us, she’s bringing it back, she’s bringing the story back. The story itself, whether she speaks it to us or she puts it in a newspaper or puts it in a report, is the report.
You can also report for duty. So you have a job and everyone there knows who you are, you’ve been there before, and they tell you to show up on Wednesday morning at nine o’clock and you report for duty, you’re bringing yourself back again to your job to do your job. Something important comes from the Latin word in, which means in, and porto meaning I carry. Something important carries meaning or carries significance to you. This is kind of a tough word to define unless you really think about the Latin words. Important, carry in, but we’re carrying meaning or carrying significance into something. So you have people important in your life. They carry significance in your life. They mean a lot to you. They mean something to you. You can actually have something small that you might carry with you that’s also important. A passport if you’re visiting another country, a driver’s license if you’re driving around town. These are small, you can actually carry them, but they also carry significance. They carry meaning, if the police pull you over and they look at your driver’s license, they’re gonna say, “Oh, okay, this carries significance.” If you draw a picture of yourself on a piece of paper and hand it to them, it doesn’t carry any significance. They’re just gonna stare at you and you’re still probably gonna get a ticket. The next word is porter. If you ever go to a hotel, a porter might greet you at the door. This is from the Latin word porto, meaning carry, and what he’s going to do is carry your suitcase or carry your bags up to your room. Then when you get to the room, you’re supposed to give him a tip because he carried your stuff up to the room for you. A portfolio is a large case for carrying important papers or at least that’s the main meaning of this word. It comes from porto meaning carry and folium meaning leaf. So it sounds like you’re carrying leaves around, right? Well, remember that in the early days of publishing, pages were called pages, but they could also be called leaves. Sometimes people still refer to the pages of a book as the leaves of a book. Think of that when you think of portfolio. Portfolio is a large case for carrying important papers. So a lawyer or an attorney working on an important case will have a portfolio of all of the papers that are relevant to that case.
Artists can also carry portfolios of their work and in this, there might actually be a physical portfolio that they open up showing their work or it might just be something that they pull up on their computer showing you a portfolio of their work.
We can also talk about portfolio when we’re talking about intangible things like someone might say to you, here’s my portfolio of stocks and bonds, Here’s my portfolio of real estate. An investor might say this to you. That does not mean that they’re gonna open a door and there are a bunch of houses right there and you can actually look at them. They’re actually indirectly, they’re talking about the documents that prove that they own these assets. And these documents are all in their portfolio. And finally, a portmanteau word is a word that is a combination of porto, meaning I carry, and mantellum, which means mantle or cloak. Now we don’t really wear mantels and cloaks anymore, but at one point in history they did, and back then when they did wear those, they would transport them, if they didn’t want them to be wrinkled, in a kind of a double suitcase that would fold up into one. It was called a portmanteau. So why am I teaching you this word? We don’t really have these double suitcases that fold up into one anymore. Well, it turns out Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland, he would take two words and combine them, just like this suitcase, to create one.
And there’s a scene when he first does this in Alice in Wonderland, where Humpty Dumpty is talking to Alice and he’s explaining to her what a portmanteau word is. And he says, it’s where you take two words, combine them to create a new word. And the example he gives is flimsy and miserable. He runs them together and creates mimsy, something that is flimsy and miserable. We have portmanteau words all over our language now. We take words like breakfast and lunch, run them together and create brunch, which happens between breakfast and lunch. We take spoon and fork, run them together to create this weird hybrid utensil called a spork. Or my favorite is destinasia. Take the word destination, which means the place you’re going, and amnesia, the tendency to forget, run them together and you get destinasia, which is reaching a destination and forgetting why you were coming there in the first place.
Okay, that’s it for English words that come from the Latin word porto. I’m gonna send you back over to my friend at the desk. Portmanteau words, huh? That’s interesting. Thank you for that, Latin expert. I bet I could create a portmanteau word. Brown rice crackers. Run ’em together and you create brackers. Doesn’t that sound appetizing? I bet they taste like brackers. I would never eat brackers. Crackers, maybe, but not brackers. Let’s see what the Greek guy has to say about carry. The Greek word carry or bring is pharaoh, and from it we get these English words. Let’s start with the easy one. The name Christopher, you’ve probably heard of before, is a combination of pharaoh, meaning bring or carry, and Christus, meaning Christ. So someone who carries the image of Christ or bears the image of Christ. Then esophagus is the tube that gets food from our mouth to our stomach. It comes from pharaoh, but you can’t see it in this word because pharaoh changed to “eso” in the future tense in Greek, which is grammar. It’s all I’m going to say about that. Just trust me. And then the last part of this word comes from “phagene,” which means to eat. You may remember that from geophagy. We talked about worms eating the dirt that they were crawling through. But an esophagus is the tube that helps us get our food from our mouth to our stomach, and it comes from “eso”, “I will”, and “phagane”, “to eat”, esophagus. A metaphor is where we bring a word or a phrase in to explain something else, and it comes from meta, which means across or beyond or with.
We’re going to focus on the across part. And what we’re doing is we’re transferring one idea across and placing it on something else. So, let me explain what I’m talking about. If you know someone who is not fun to be around in the morning, you might say, “He is a bear in the morning.” That does not mean that if you go into his room and open the door, a bear is going to crawl out of the bed.
It’s a metaphor. We’re explaining through the image of a bear that this guy is no fun to be around until he gets his coffee. He is a grump. Dysphoria comes from “dys” which means bad or hard as in difficult, not rock hard, hard as in difficult. So dysphoria is a bad feeling. You remember when we talked about euphoria? Euphoria from “eu” meaning good and “phero” meaning carry or bring is a sense of elated happiness. So if you are jazzed, if you are feeling it, if you’re feeling great, you are feeling euphoria or you are feeling euphoric. The opposite is dysphoria. So remember that dys means difficult or hard or bad. So something difficult is happening to you, something hard is happening to you, something bad is happening to you, and it’s causing your feelings to sink. You’re experiencing dysphoria. Dysphoria is a negative down feeling, the opposite of euphoria. Amphora is a Greek jar used to carry liquids. Actually, the Romans used them too. So a Greek or Roman jar used to carry liquids like oil or wine or whatever it was the Greeks and the Romans were running around with back then.
On both sides of an amphora, you’ll see handles and that’s where the name comes from because amphi in Greek means on both sides or of both kinds. We’ll focus on the on both sides part here. And then pharaoh meaning carry. So this is a jar that the Greeks and the Romans were able to carry because it had handles on both sides. The next word kind of has a negative meaning to it these days, but it hasn’t always. The word paraphernalia comes from the Greek word para, which means besides, and the phernalia part of it comes from pharaoh meaning I carry. So this is something you carry besides yourself to do your job. So if you’re a cameraman and You show up to the job if you come alone, that’s not good. You need your equipment. You need your stuff. You need your Paraphernalia, you need tripods and lightings and most importantly you need a camera if your dad or your uncle Or someone in your family is a police officer.
You may have heard them talk about drug Paraphernalia before maybe they find drug paraphernalia in a house or in a car that they’re searching This is the equipment that you that someone needs to either Create or consume illegal drugs That’s why it’s kind of a negative word in our culture these days. It hasn’t always been a negative word in ancient Greece paraphernalia was actually the the goods or the belongings or the stuff that a woman would bring with her when she got married and moved into her husband’s house. Chromatophore is really cool. This is a cell containing a pigment that enables the creature to change color. So you’ve seen this in chameleons, you see this in octopi. They can actually blend into their surroundings by changing the color of their skin. It’s epic. Comes from the Greek word chromos, meaning color, and pharo, meaning carry. They literally carry in another color to hide from someone who’s about to eat them or to hide so that they can eat someone else. The next word is pyrophoric. Pyrophoric comes from the Greek word pyre, which means fire, and pharo, meaning carry. Something pyrophoric might actually spontaneously combust when exposed to air. In other words, if you add air, it will light on fire. Famous example of something pyrophoric is the element phosphorus. Phosphorus also from pharaoh, meaning I carry, and from the Greek word for light, which is phos. Phosphorus is an element that you’ll find in fireworks and in matches. When you strike a match, the reason it lights up is because it’s pyrophoric. Semaphore is a system of signaling. This goes back to the days of old wooden ships and trains and locomotives. We still have ships and trains around today, but these days they use more of a digital system of signaling. In the old days, they would use flags or lights to signal each other. And they would send messages back using semaphore, using this system of flags or lights. It comes from the Greek word sima, meaning sign or mark and ferro meaning I carry. And the last word is anaphora. Anaphora is really cool. It’s something that we can do with our language. Anaphora is when we repeat a phrase or a word over and over and over and over again at the beginning of each sentence for emphasis.
So, famous example of anaphora, you’ve probably read the book “Green Eggs and Ham” by Dr. Seuss. In that book, there’s a character who wants another character to eat green eggs and ham, and the other character is not having it, not interested. And he lets the first character know by telling him, I will not eat them in a house. I will not eat them with a mouse. I will not eat them in a box. I will not eat them near a fox. I will not eat them here. I will not eat them there. I will not eat them anywhere. And he keeps repeating, I will not, I will not, I will not, I will not, I will not, at the beginning of every sentence.
That is anaphora. Anaphora comes from the Greek word ap, ana, and pharo, meaning carry. So in a sense, you keep bringing up the same phrase. You keep bringing up the same word, and you do it for emphasis. That’s it for this video, and you are so much smarter because you now know all of these English words that come from the Greek word pharaoh.
I’m gonna send you back to my friend at the desk. (slurping) All right, you’re done? Aha, thanks for that Greek expert. Anaphora, I like that word. I can think of some anaphora. These are not that bad actually, guys. I’d eat ’em with a fox. I’d eat ’em from a box. I’d eat ’em while sitting at a desk. I would eat ’em while hanging out with pests. I’d rather eat ’em though, dipped in chocolate. Well, there you go. You guys are now 20 words smarter than you used to be. Actually, I forgot, I taught you a new word. I taught you the word “brackers.” So 21 words smarter than you were a little while ago. Well, get out there and impress your friends. Eat some brackers. And I’ll see you next time. a lot better if these were dipped in chocolate.