Paging Chalky White
During the last episode of Boadwalk Empire - set during the prohibition era - a character called upon another by shouting out "Paging Chalky White!". I did a double take because, to my chagrin, I thought that the word "paging" came from the electronic device known as a pager.According to dictionary.com
Page. to summon formally by calling out the name of repeatedly: He had his father paged in the hotel lobby.
Have you ever made a similar mistake or been surprised to find out that a word is much older than you had thought?
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Have you ever made a similar mistake or been surprised to find out that a word is much older than you had thought?
Frequently. For a long time I thought mentor was a modern coining taken from the same root as mental, etc, though of course it comes from the character Mentor in the Odyssey, and as far as I can tell any similarity to Latin mens/mentis is coincidental. Thus mentee is an entirely spurious modern construction, it should be a telemachus.A couple of examples that come to mind are Russian place names, which I once assumed to be Soviet-era coinings, but turn out to be rather older. Magnitogorsk in Russia does mean magnet mountain, and was insignificant as a place before it became an industrial centre in the 20th century, but the name goes back to the 18th century. Semipalatinsk, the Russian name for a place now in Kazakhstan, was known as a nuclear testing site in Soviet times, and always sounded like some modern coining to me too, but is also 18th century in origin.
One can have surprises the other way too. I was surprised to discover octopus turns out to be a ca. 17th century coining in "modern Latin", not a very old word at all. In modern Greek it is called chtapodi, which puts essentially the same elements together, though I don't know how/when they got that word; in Classical Latin it was polypus, which they borrowed from essentially the same word in ancient Greek. Our word polyp comes from that, often overlooking the original meaning of many feet, as we may sometimes use the word to refer to something of essentially lump-like form.
Edited by: homer
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I only learned recently, about twenty seconds ago to be precise, that Magnitogorsk was not from the Stalin period.6
#6--There are still pages, today of either gender, employed by the US Senate. The House of Representatives used to have them but dropped them partly because of the Mark Foley scandal and partly because Blackberries and the like made them obsolete.
