uNCOMMONOLOGY bLOG cATEGORY
Words carry histories. They are borrowed, shortened, misheard, reinvented, translated and occasionally pushed into service for purposes their original speakers could never have imagined.
Language & Etymology follows those journeys. Expect strange word origins, forgotten languages, linguistic experiments, expressions with unexpected histories and the peculiar ways sounds and meanings travel between people, places and centuries.
In the nineteenth century, French musician Jean-François Sudre attempted something extraordinary: a universal language built from only seven musical notes. Solresol could be spoken, sung, played, written, coloured or signed—turning language into something that could travel between the voice, the eye and an instrument.
The origin of OK lies in a deliberately misspelled newspaper joke. From “oll korrect” in 1839 to Martin Van Buren’s 1840 campaign, discover how a passing piece of slang became one of the world’s most adaptable expressions.
Some words arrive quietly. Bikini did not. Its name came from a Marshallese atoll made globally famous by American nuclear testing, then produced a fashion sensation and an accidental family of words built around a suffix that never existed.
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