Ekwos became the Greek hippos, which has given us: hippodrome – a place where horses run, from hippos + dromos for racetrack; hippopotamus, or horse of the river from hippos + potamos for river; and a part of the brain that was thought to resemble the seahorse, the hippocampus from hippos + campus for sea monster.

The name Phillip is derived from the Greek Philippos meaning friend of horses. By implication, Phillips were of noble blood because only they could afford to own horses.

Ekwos also became the Latin equus which has given us: equine, of or pertaining to horses; equerry, originally an officer in charge of the horses; and equestrian, as of or pertaining to horse-riding.

The dignified Roman word equus was reserved for the best horses while the common slang word for a horse was caballus, referring to packhorses or work horses and implying they were hacks or nags. Caballus was picked up by Roman soldiers in their campaigns with the barbarian tribes and brought back into Roman language. Caballus became cavallo (Italian), cheval (French) caballo (Spanish), capall (Irish) and ceffyl (Welsh). Cheval, the French word, has given English chivalry, cavalry, cavalcade and cavalier.

Nag is a native English word for a small horse and has an unknown origin. A hack is a shortening of hackney, for an ordinary horse, referring to the horse breeding pastures of Hackney near London (and now very much in London). Many of the horses pulled taxi-cabs and the use of hack became associated with hired horses. This led to the identification of hack with being tired and broken down. It was applied to certain types of writers.

There was also an Old English word, eoh, derived from the PIE, ekwos, but it disappeared from the language to be replaced by horse. Horse is a Middle English word derived from the Old English word, hors. This is the most difficult word of all to trace.

Remarkably horse may also be a word that can be traced back to the Proto-Indo-Europeans. A strong argument is that horse is derived from kurs, the PIE word for run, which was used as a euphemism for horse instead of ekwos. Ekwos may not have been used as the everyday word due to a religious or hunters’ taboo on using the name of the animal.

The argument is that the PIE word kurs became khursa in Proto-Germanic which gave Old Norse, hross, Middle Dutch ros, German Roß and of course Old English, hors. Kurs also became the Latin currere, meaning to run and also gave rise to our Modern English hurry!

So while we wonder at the skills of equestrians as they ride their horses (Equus ferus caballus) around the hippodrome we should remember that the words we are using have their origins at least as long ago as there have been horsemen.

I had been introduced to Peter Carey’s short stories at University and had devoured Bliss, his first novel, when it was first published. Carey is a wonderfully creative writer and Bliss delivered a wickedly comic satire of modern life in suburban Australia.

I lived in London for part of the Eighties and I remember taking some friends to see the film at a cinema near Picadilly Circus. I was delighted to see the wonderfully funny story played out in such distinctively Australian locations and against the Sydney skline. But my English friends found the film quite comfronting (as had, I found out later, some of the audience at its screening at the Cannes Film Festival in 1985). Some did not understand the satirical intentions and took the story at face value.

Bliss means extreme happiness or ecstasy. In a Christian, religious context it is the ecstasy of salvation or the joy that comes from spiritual connection with the divine.

Bliss, for several centuries, has been associated with ignorance as Thomas Gray describes in 1742 (from On a Distant Prospect of Eton College):

Yet ah! why should they know their fate,

Since sorrow never comes too late,

And happiness too swiftly flies?

Thought would destroy their paradise.

No more; where ignorance is bliss,

‘Tis folly to be wise.

In the opening pages of Bliss, the central character dies and has a post-life experience sliding “between the spaces in the air itself”. The character is Harry Joy and he is experiencing an ecstasy.

Harry Joy returns to life and as he appraises his life he comes to believe that he has been living in hell. One aspect of this is that he believes all of his advertising clients are producing products that cause cancer. Harry believes that he has been living in a state of bliss not seeing the evils around him.

Peter Carey ran a very successful advertising business and Ray Lawrence spent most of the time between Bliss and his next film, Lantana (2001), making television commercials. They both must have had a blissful time with their portrayal of the evils of advertising.

So how did our light and airy cloud manage to escape it’s family of clods and clots? The probable explanation is that large, dense cumulus clouds were thought to resemble lumps of rock so took the name, cloud, and the lumps of rock were left being called lumps of rock.

Meteorologists have named clouds in a very ordered and logical way as you might expect. The main types of cloud have good scientific names chosen from solid Latin roots:

Alto – high cloud – from Italian for high and from Latin Altus;

Cirrus – thin, wispy cloud – from Latin for curl, fringe;

Cumulus – tall, fluffy cloud – from Latin for a heap or pile;

Nimbus – rain-bearing cloud – from Latin for raincloud; and

Stratus – a broad flat cloud – from Latin for spread out.

These basic cloud types can be combined to describe in-between types, for instance, a cumulonimbus is a cumulus cloud bearing rain or a cirrostratus is thin and wispy and spread out.

However, there appears to be some mischievous meteorologists out there who find this all far too dull. Watch out for mammatocumulus or breast clouds (from Latin mamma for breast or udder); tuba clouds that look like trumpets hanging from cumulus clouds; and scud clouds that shoot along under storms (scud, related to scuttle, means to move quickly and perhaps comes from the Middle English scut meaning to race like a hare).

You can only think that Shelley would have been proud of them.

The vuvuzela can perhaps claim ancestry from the kudu horn. The kudu horn came from a large antelope and was the traditional call to African villagers to attend village meetings.

There are two explanations of the origins of the word vuvuzela One theory suggests it comes from isiZulu for making noise. The other, that it comes from township slang for shower, because it showers people with music and looks like a shower head.

The vuvuzela has created the tournament’s early controversy. Many people hate them and there have been calls to have them banned. BBC broadcasters are contemplating turning off the crowd noise after receiving hundreds of complaints. However, many of the local and visiting fans are enjoying the noise far too much. The FIFA president, Joseph Blatter, has ruled out a ban, saying on Twitter that:

I don’t see banning the music traditions of fans in their own country. … Africa has a different rhythm, a different sound.

Boogieblast, a South African manufacturer of vuvuzela, suggest a simple explanation (and a nice little piece of marketing):

… you only hate them, if you don’t have one …

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.

But becoming a quinquagenarian, being fifty-something, a person aged between 50 and 59 years, is not an achievement that is happily celebrated. Being fifty is generally accepted as being the beginning of late middle age – not a milestone to be welcomed. Youth has flown away.

The effects of ageing have become undeniable; quinquagenarians have found their eyesight has deteriorated, their muscles ache and their memory matter is disappearing in a process of cognitive decline.

Quinquagenarians have started to realise that the process of ageing is inevitable. So they have started thinking about activities recommended to minimise the decline including staying mentally active (for instance, by reading word-of-the-week blogs), staying socially active, exercising, reducing stress, and maintaining a good diet.

Although there is no cure for ageing, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have recently discovered that feeding old rats a combination of acetyl-L-carnitine and alpha-lipoic acid has rejuvenated the rats. The research leader reported “these old rats got up and did the Macarena”. These supplements are available from health food stores.

However, Oscar Wilde probably summed it up for the majority of quinquagenarians when he wrote:

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

We only count the non-compound words and find that fun words are not at all that much fun. There are 25 fun words listed in my Macquarie that start with ‘fun’. There are six words that are no fun at all: fundament, fundamentalism, funeral, funereal, fungicide & funk.

There are a lot of neutral words (thirteen): function, functional, functionalism, functionary, fund, fundamental, fundus, fungi, fungible, fungoid, fungus, funicular, & funnel. These excite no passions at all.

But once the survey is complete there are only six really fun words: fun, funambulist, funfair, funky, funnies, & funny.

This interpretation would be different if undertaken by a specialist. An economist might find fungible (where one unit or portion of something can be replaced by another) and fund to be quite exhilarating. A mycologist may find fungus and fungi exciting and a fungoid (fungus-like) absolutely distracting. Anatomists might find the fundament (the anus) and fundus (the base of an animal organ) the sort of words to raise their passions. However, we, as laypeople, shall remain un-emotional about them.

The fun words are undisputable: the funambulist, the tightrope walker, is fun and being funky is certainly not dull; I would spend time reading funnies (comic strips) if I didn’t have my dictionaries; and there is no doubt that a funfair is enjoyable.

Neither is there any dispute about the un-fun words. The fundament becomes, somehow – with -al and -ism added, religious fanaticism, a very serious business. There is very little fun at a funeral nor at something that is funereal (funeral-like). Fungicide (fungus killer) would send any mushroom into a funk (I am cheating a bit here counting funk as a black mood and not a bit of soul music but it has its representative in funky).

Statistically, fun has let us down. Only 24 per cent of fun words are actually happy words, the remainder, 76 per cent are just no fun whatsoever. This is, of course, what you learn when you read the dictionary!

Every instant of time is a pinprick of eternity

Marcus Aurelius, was Roman Emperor from 161 to 180 AD. We know him because he is the wise Caesar played by Richard Harris, with Russel Crowe as Maximus, in Ridley Scott’s film, Gladiator. He is known as a philosopher king and wrote several influential works, particularly supporting the Stoics.

Time, is perhaps one of the most difficult words to define because of its very conceptual nature. The Oxford Dictionary defines it as a continuous, measurable quantity in which events occur in a sequence proceeding from the past through the present to the future.

But Marcus Aurelius is much closer to the original meaning when he spoke of pinpricks of eternity. In Old English, tima, meant a limited space of time. It comes from Old German timon and is similar to the Old Norse timi. But the word has very old roots in the original language of Eurasia, the Proto-Indo-European word dimon, from the base da meaning to cut up, divide.

So, originally time meant not the continuous quantity that we now use it to mean, but bits of time. The word time is closely related to the word tide, which came from Old English tid for a point or portion of time. The tide has come to mean a portion of time defined by the rise and fall of the sea.

So when we say time and tide wait for no man - which is one of the oldest expressions in English - we risk being tautological. A thousand years ago another philosopher king, Canute, sat on the beach to prove the truth of this expression to his courtiers.

Tidings is also a derivative from the same origins. When we bring good tidings we bring good news of an event or an occurrence – a particularly pleasant moment in time.

Who is Tavi Gevinson? Gevinson is the 14-year-old author of the StyleRookie blog. Gevinson started her blog at the age of 11 and has built a huge following in the blogosphere:

Guess who is going to be all fancy n stuff and talk at L2’s Generation Y conference this Friday? Me, that’s who! And I’m going to be talking about the Unpredictability of Gen Y …

And not surprisingly, as reported by the Economist, she stole the show that had been put together to focus on “tomorrow’s affluent consumer”. Representatives of luxury-goods businesses, hung on Gevinson’s every word.

The lesson for today’s businesses is that those of Generation Y (people born between 1980 and 2000) know more than us about how to make the most out of social-networking technologies.

Some of us are Baby Boomers (born after 1945 until about 1960) who didn’t own a computer until we were well into adulthood. We possibly had to program our computers to perform our calculations and may even remember having to feed paper cards into a mainframe. Computers were calculating machines.

Most of us are X Generation (born between 1961 and 1981) we experienced the growth of personal computers and witnessed the birth of the Internet. Internet 1.0 was about sharing information and we played space invaders by putting lots of coins in arcade machines.

But those of Generation Y have grown up with computers and treat them as an essential part of their everyday lives – technology is social and about entertainment. They have participated in the growth of Web 2.0 as a means of participating in online communities, for sharing gossip and for on-line collaboration. They are also known as the Net Generation!

Do you know how to use Web 2.0 to connect and engage with Generation Y? Madrigal Communications can help you put together a do-it-yourself social media marketing campaign for as little as $250! Our consultant will sit down with you and show you how you can use a combination of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Foursquare and your website to connect your business with the Net Generation. Contact us to find out more!

Be valuable

Don’t undersell your products or services. Emphasise value not price! Even if your customer is price-driven they still need to trust you to buy from you.

Be honest

Don’t say you are the best. Tell how you will provide the benefits that your customers want or need. That shows that you are the best at what they want.

Be authentic

Let your personality stand out. People don’t like superficiality. Don’t be just another business selling a product or service.

Be human

Your business is not an object – it is the quality, expertise, and experience of its people. It is what you do for your customers. It is not an “it” it is a “we”.

Be accountable

You are the most important thing in your business. Don’t be anonymous. If something goes wrong your customer knows who to talk to. Make sure you have a relationship with your customers.

Need help?

If your business needs ideas to build trust with its marketing give me a call, Tim Entwisle, at Madrigal Communications, valuable, honest, authentic, human and not anonymous.

Some pundits are predicting a hung parliament; others a strong Conservative win; and there is an expected high voter turnout. I found a wonderful, 1989 quote from David S. Broder, currently the White House correspondent for the Washington Post:

The science of interpreting elections has a fancy name: psephology. A shorter, simpler and more accurate title for much election analysis is: fiction.

Psephology is the branch of sociology that studies elections and its practitioners are psephologists. It comes from the Greek word psephos for pebbles. Psephism is the process of voting.

Although the word is a recent concoction, it reminds us that democracy is very old and that votes were once cast by Greeks dropping pebbles in the urns of their chosen candidates. A ballot is the Roman or Italian version – a ballot comes from pallotte, for the small balls that were similarly used as counters.

In a less positive voting system, ostracism, comes to us from ostraka, the Greek for potsherds or pottery tokens that were used when Athenians voted to exile one of their citizens for ten years.

But in a British election with their first past the post system, there will be questions about whether the party that gets the most pebbles gets the most seats.