Haggard Hawks 71

Center ND, wolf men and splitting time

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MIDDLE GROUND

 

A fact we just couldn’t leave unexplained this week also turned out to be the week’s most popular: the town at the geographical centre of North America is called Center.

 

That on its own is interesting enough, but then to find out that it’s name is a complete coincidence? How the dickens did that happen?

 

Well. Center was founded in 1902, and so called because it was believed at the time to stand roughly in the centre of Oliver County, North Dakota. Alas, it doesn’t. But that doesn’t matter. The town laid claim to nothing else, the years ticked by, and today Center is home to around 550 people. 

 

Elsewhere in North Dakota there are two towns—Rugby and Robinson—that both stake claims to being the centre of North America. There is an annual town fair in Rugby, for instance, to celebrate “Geographical Center Day”, and there’s a bar in Robinson that sells t-shirts claiming to be the centre of all America. But there can’t be two geographical centres—and when an article appeared in the Wall Street Journal in 2016 pointing out precisely that, University of Buffalo geographer Peter Rogerson stepped into the fray. 

 

Rogerson’s work involves using modern surveying techniques to calculate the precise centre of towns, states, countries and, at a push, continents. When he heard that no one had attempted to figure out the precise centre of North America is since 1931 (when Rugby first took the title), he set to work.

 

The people of Rugby and Robinson heald their collective breath. Unfortunately for them, Rogerson found that the precise centre of the entire continent was—well, Center. And even more astoundingly, its name was a complete coincidence. 

 

Elsewhere this week we found out:

 

  • cowards were quakebuttocks in seventeenth century English
  • you can't find rabbits without finding nettles, apparently...
  • ...and the Elizabethans knew that it was proverbially hard to shave eggs
  • feel free to call snowy owls harfangs from now on
  • twilight (the time, not the movie) was once known as owl-light
  • and someone has decided what the fear of decision-making should be called.

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WOLF MAN 

 

A popular bit of etymology cropped up on HH this week: the fact that the “were” of werewolf literally means “man”.

 

This is something that we’ve touched on before on HH, in a blog about the original etymological meanings of man (“human”), woman (“wife-man”), boy (“servant, aide”), and girl (“child”). It’s also a story that you might have spotted in The Accidental Dictionary—but for the uninitiated, here’s a quick recap...

 

First things first, man hasn’t always meant simply “man”. Like the “man” in mankind and manslaughter, back in the Old English period man chiefly meant simply “human being”. If you wanted to talk specifically about a male human being, you had to use a word that’s long since fallen out of use: wer. And it’s that word that sits, fossilized in the language, at the root of werewolf. 

 

And whereas people continued talking and writing about werewolves, wer on its own disappeared from the language as man became the more dominant word. 

 

The opposite of wer, meanwhile, was wif, which originally meant “woman” but eventually came to be used only of married women; like wer, its original, more general sense still survives in ancient compounds like housewife and midwife.

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AFTER HOURS

 

A quick vocabulary lesson to finish things off this week.

 

Another of this week’s most curious facts was that 1/15th of an hour—a period of precisely 4 minutes—is called a part. And a while back, we found out that a moment was once precisely defined as 1/40th of an hour, or precisely 90 seconds.

 

But when it comes to divisions of time nobody uses any more, these two are just the tip of a temporal iceberg. 

 

1/4 of an hour (as well as being called a quarter of an hour, of course) was once known as a punct, or point. And two 15-minute puncts made a semihore, or half-hour. A scruple was once variously used to describe 1/60th of a day (precisely 24 minutes), or 1/18th of a minute (precisely 3 1/3 seconds). And smallest of all was the atom, which by mediaeval reckoning corresponded to 1/376th of a minute—meaning that there were over 22,000 atoms in an hour.

 

There were no mechanisms accurate enough to correctly time an atom back in the mediaeval period, of course, so the term was typically only used theoretically. For that reason, appropriately enough, this smallest of the smallest subdivisions of time was given a name essentially meaning “individable.”

AND FINALLY...

ANAGRAMS 37

 

Four more tricky anagrams to round things off this week: each of the words below can be rearranged to spell another much more familiar dictionary word. What are they? 

 

TRINDLE

TRIATICS

TRIFECTAS

TRIVALENCE

 

Last week’s solution:

YARNS, BRAINY, GYRATES, ATROCITY

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