I don’t know about you, but growing up in Oregon, we never went “to the beach,” but we were always going to the coast. I wonder if that’s a uniquely Oregonian thing. I honestly don’t know.

I like the word “coast” a lot. When I was growing up, I remember “Coast to Coast” hardware being a thing (I think it was a chain). We also talk of one “coasting” in a car, or a bike, as they let gravity kick in and don’t accelerate down a hill or whatever. I just looked it up, and “coast” in this sense has the root idea of travelling along the coast, but is a more figurative meaning.

I don’t have a snappy quote for you here, although I did do searches for “debt quotes” and found a lot of nonsense. I thought of using the Tyrion Lannister quote, but didn’t want that vibe necessarily (still a good quote!). So today I wanted to dive into the etymology of the word “debt.” Undoubtedly this is a topic often on many people’s minds, considering all the credit card and student loan and other debt out there (student loans are a sore subject for me, ugh). But I think the word is interesting and worthy of further study.

“There was nothing to fear and nothing to doubt…” - Radiohead, “Pyramid Song” (from the album Amnesiac)

In these uncertain and doubtful times, well, I thought it would be helpful to go through the etymology of the word “doubt.” Now, of course, before it makes its way to English, it goes through a lot of intermediary languages, but my concern is generally with penetrating back to the source. “Doubt” comes from Latin dubitare, which means “to be uncertain, to be in doubt, to waver in opinion or judgment” (L&S, i.e., Lewis & Short’s A Latin Dictionary, s.v. dubito). More directly from dubitare, we get things like “dubious” (= “doubtful”), “indubitable” (= “undoubtable”), “indubitably,” “dubitation” (though that’s admittedly rather archaic; lit. “the state of doubting, the action of doubting”). And of course, once it morphs to “doubt” (through the French, which lengthens the Latin long -u- to the diphthong -ou), we get “undoubtedly,” “doubtful,” and I’m sure there are others I’m missing. English “redoubt” is not related, though; it comes, via French, from Latin reducere, “to withdraw, draw back,” meaning “a place of refuge” (= a place to which one withdraws).

“I just want to go back to bed and hibernate for the rest of the year”

Welcome to the first Ichneutymon post! I’d ideally like to do this roughly weekly, and I hope it will be fun but also informative for y’all. Since winter is kicking off in the northern hemisphere, well, I thought hibernate would be a fitting word to inaugurate this feature. Just like in the example sentence above, I love sleeping in and sometimes I envy bears and their ability to hibernate for ages at a time. At the same time, I really love doing things when I’m not sleeping, so it’s probably good I’m a human!

Dear Reader: this is the first in what I hope will be an ongoing series of posts on etymology, philology, and just fun with words. I used to blog about strictly Classics stuff, as I was trying to blog professionally and pursue a tenure-track career. Now it’s just fun and I like geeking out about words. So here’s the first of, dis volentibus, many. Enjoy.

Have you ever heard of the digamma? I won’t blame you if you haven’t; it’s kind of an esoteric, and easily forgettable, little letter. It’s found in some of the oldest Greek words, and even though it disappeared from most dialects of even ancient Greek, its absence is felt, and it somehow even lives on in Latin. First of all, what does it look like?