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.
Okay, when you come in to kick the ball, try to keep your foot down toward the base of the ball and kick it away from my head, but hold up, hold up, just just wait a minute.
Hey guys, you’re here for a word? Foot. I’m teaching these guys, these local kids how to kick a football. Take foot over to the guy at the desk. That’ll be your word. Meanwhile, I’m going to get back to– hold up guys, hold up! 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. That guy, can you believe that? Lined up like that, he deserved to get kicked in the face. You guys ever play football? Yeah, I was pretty good. I could throw an amazing three-pointer. Want one? No? How about you? Alright. Okay. Hey, welcome to Word Up, everyone. Today we’re talking about foot. And you know what? My Latin friend, I don’t think he’s ready. So let’s start with the Greek guy. I don’t have to clean that up, do I? Hey, hey, hey, everybody. The Greek word for foot is “pus” and the root word is “poros.” So watch for POD in most of these words, but not all of them. First one is tripod. In Greek, tri means three and pod means foot. So a tripod is something with three feet. Well, yes it is. It’s an object that holds up lights and cameras and microphones and everything in the room I’m seeing around me and probably what you’re seeing on the screen behind me too. A podium is an elevated platform that we use to put someone on when we want them to be prominent. So, the speaker at a rally or the musician at a concert. Or, in the Olympics, when someone wins gold, silver, or bronze, we put those athletes up on a podium to give them a little prominence over all the other athletes because they outran them.
Podiatry is from two Greek words, pod, which you know, and iatros in Greek means doctor. So if you run them together, you get podiatrist, which means foot doctor, and podiatry is the branch of medicine that deals with feet. If you break your foot, you’re going to need to go talk to a podiatrist, a foot doctor. He’ll know what to do. Antipodes is from the Greek word anti, which means opposite, and podos, what you know, which means foot. So you have your foot in two opposite places, right? Is that what it means? Kind of. Antipodes means directly opposite, and we use it to talk, we use it in geography to talk about locations. So the North Pole is the antipodes of the South Pole. We can also use this word informally to refer to New Zealand and to Australia. Now, wherever you are in the world, Australia and New Zealand may not be directly opposite to you on the other side of the planet.
But when the word became popular, it was mostly used in England by English speakers, and guess what? The Antipodes for them is New Zealand and Australia. Down in the Antipodes, there is a creature called the platypus. The Greek word platis means flat or wide, and as it turns out, This creature has flat or wide feet and also a bill and a tail and it’s furry and it lays eggs. And I still don’t know what it is. It lives in the water. It’s aquatic. Anyway, platypus. Picture one behind me. Maybe you can figure out what it is. There’s a class of animals that live in the water called cephalopods. The first part of this word comes from the Greek word kepheli, which means head. So cephalopods are head feets, right? I know that’s terrible English, but anyway. Yeah, that’s what they are. They are creatures with well-developed heads, eyes, and they have sucker bearing tentacles. You’ve seen these before. Squids are in the cephalopod class. The nautilus is in the cephalopod class, and the octopus is in the cephalopod class. Octopus also comes from from the Greek word for foot. The word octo in Greek means eight. So an octopus is a cephalopod that has eight tentacle sucker bearing tentacles. Yeah. Anyway, if you see more than one octopus, particularly if you see 3.14 of them swim by, then you’re looking at octopi. Pseudo in Greek means fake or false. and that’s where we get the word pseudopod. So something out there has a fake foot or a false foot. Well, it turns out that cells, particularly amoebas, will sometimes send out a temporary growth that looks like a foot, and they’ll send it out to pull themselves into a different location, or they’ll send it out to find food. The first time scientists saw this underneath a microscope, it looked like a foot, but they knew it wasn’t a foot, So they decided it was a fake foot, so they called it a pseudopod, a fake foot. Gastropods are a class of mollusks such as the snail or the slug. And the word gastir in Greek means stomach. If you look at these guys, it looks like they’re walking around on their stomachs. So they’re called stomach footers. Sounds a whole lot better though if you use the Greek words gastropod. And the last word is apital. Apital, it means no feet at all. Snakes, eels, fish, these guys are apital. They have no feet. When you take the letter A and put it in front of words, sometimes it means without or no, especially when you use the Greek prefix a.
Let me give you another example. The word muse means think. That’s why you go to a museum, to think about what you’re looking at. But if you put a in front of it, you get the word amuse, which means no thinking. So you go to an amusement park not to think, you go to an amusement park to eat really wild food and to ride really wild rides.
I love those things. Anyway, that word at the beginning, that letter at the beginning, A, means no or without, which is why apital means no feet. All right, there you go. You are 10 words smarter. Your friends are gonna be so impressed when you use these. Hmm. Podium. That’s a good word. I remember standing on the podium. No, I did. We were good. We were good. I got to stand up there with the rest of the team and we all got trophies. I’m pretty proud of it. What about you, Latin guy? Now that you’re cleaned up, what have you got to say about foot? Guys, the Latin word for foot is pes, and the root word is pedis. If you drop the I-S, you end up with ped, and that’s what we’re going to look for in these words. The first one is pedal. A pedal is a foot-operated lever. If you jump on a bicycle, my favorite means of transportation, you put your feet on the pedals. If you get in a car, you put your foot on the gas pedal. Or if you want to stop it, you put your foot on the brake pedal. Or if you don’t feel like taking a car or a bike or a plane or a train, you can be a pedestrian. If you look at the beginning of this word, you see “ped” right Right there, it means foot. A pedestrian is a walker. This is something that English does, which is pretty cool. Pedestrian can also mean boring. So if you want to describe something as boring, you can use boring, dull, mundane, or the word pedestrian, which means walker, but it can be used to mean boring.
I guess somebody thought that walking was the most boring way to transport yourself. I like walking, but anyway, there you go. A walking salesperson is a peddler. I used to see these all the time when I was a kid. These days, I don’t see them so much anymore. But a peddler is a walking salesperson who goes door to door in your neighborhood, selling whatever it is that they are peddling. A pedigree is a family tree or a lineage or a genealogy. Now, it’s about to get weird. Pedigree means family tree, but this word went from Latin through the French language before it ended up in English. And in French, it actually means, it was actually pied de grue, which I think I said correctly. But anyway, it means the foot of a crane, the bird crane. And if you look at the foot of the bird, it kinda looks like a family tree. So I guess somebody was working on their family tree and they got tired of it and they walked outside and they saw a bird out by the pond and they looked at the foot and they thought, hey, and they made the connection, pedigree.
We can use pedigree to talk about ourselves, our family trees, or you can use it to talk about animals. You hear about pedigrees for dogs, pedigrees for horses. Anyway, family tree, pedigree. A pedicure is to take care of your feet. The cure part at the end of this word comes from the Latin word cura, which means care for. So pedicure is care for the feet. This is not medicine though. This is something you, well, it’s something really women do more than men. So if you go get a manicure, you’re getting your hands taken care of, or a pedicure, you’re getting your feet taken care of. So they probably paint your fingernails, paint your toenails, maybe massage your feet. I don’t know, ’cause I’ve actually never had this done. and now I’m talking about things I don’t understand. But I do know pedicure comes from the Latin words meaning care for the feet. A biped is a two-footed creature from the Latin word bis which means twice and ped which means foot, so twice the feet. You’re a biped, I’m a biped, chickens are bipeds, roosters are bipeds. If you have four legs, then you are a quadruped. Quadruped comes from the Latin word for four and pes, which means foot or ped, which means foot. So dogs are quadrupeds, cats are quadrupeds. You’ve probably got quadrupeds running around your house. So quadrupeds have four feet. There is a group of creatures on this planet called arthropods that have a lot of feet. One type of arthropod is a centipede. Centum in Latin means a hundred and ped means foot. So centipede, a hundred feet. So these guys have a hundred feet. Not really, it just looks like they have 100 feet and so they’re called centipedes. There’s another one called a millipede. Mille in Latin means a thousand. So do these guys have a thousand feet? Probably not, but it looks like they do. They have a lot, so they’re called millipedes. Centipede, 100 feet, millipede, thousand feet. What do you call them if you cut them in half? Dead. The next word is impede. To impede is to slow someone down, to hinder or obstruct them. And it actually goes back to an old Latin word for to shackle the feet. Of course, you see the ped in there, and that means foot. So if you put something on, you’re impeding, the Romans would shackle their prisoners to keep them from running away. That obstructed them, that hindered them, that slowed them down. If you impede someone, you’re slowing them down. So you guys are all getting together to do your homework with your friends and you won’t stop talking. You’re impeding everyone. You’re slowing them down. Impede came into English from Latin, but there’s another word that came into English from Latin from the same word, impede. It just went through French first and it came out the other side as impeach. And it has a very specific definition. To impeach someone is to accuse a public official of misconduct. And guess what? If you do that, you are trying to slow them down. So it kind of has the same meaning, it’s just more specific. You’re still trying to slow this public official down because they’re doing the wrong things while they’re up there in public office. But it’s just very specific. And finally, expedite. To expedite is to speed something up. Remember that Roman prisoner, they were putting shackles on? Well, if you take them off, One of the words for to remove something in Latin is ex. And you see that at the beginning of the word expedite. If you take those shackles off, he can now move faster. Well, if you expedite something in English, you’re making it move faster. So let’s say your mom told you to ship your grandmother’s Christmas present, and you procrastinated. Well, now you have to take it down to the post office, and you have to say to those guys, I’m going to pay you extra. Will you please expedite this package? Will you make it go faster? Will you speed up the process? There you go, my friends. All these new words you’ve got that come from the Latin word foot. Go have a blast with them. No, it’s true, guys. Got a trophy for, yeah, we were first place. We were good. Check it out, huh? You wanna see? It’s kinda wobbly. All right, well, there you go, everyone. 20 new English words you’ve learned this episode of Word Up from the Latin and Greek word for foot. I’m gonna send you out there to impress your friends and I’m gonna continue admiring my wobbly trophy, Stanley Erickson participation trophy. What? Who is Stanley Erickson?