The podictionary word for today is impact:  I was listening the other day to Richard Lederer on NPR saying that about 10 years ago a national public radio poll found that the number one pet peeve with listeners was the use of the word impact when someone could have just as easily said affect. 

Now I know that Richard Lederer is more of a descriptionist than a prescriptionist so he won’t mind me saying that what this really means is that people have too many pet peeves.  This usage isn’t some modern degradation of the English language. 

According to the Oxford English Dictionary the word impact appeared in English a little before Shakespeare where its meaning was more one of sardines in a can.  The meaning of banging into something only arose in 1781, and it was only 38 years later that it was first used instead of affect.  So the object of this pet peeve has about a 200 year old pedigree.  So I say, get a life, why worry if someone uses a word in a way you wouldn’t have.  As long as you understood what they meant, isn’t that the point?   If that makes your blood boil I’m sorry. 

I call to my defense the first guy who used impact when he could have used affect he was no less than Samuel Coleridge.  You may recognize some of his work The Rime of the Ancient Mariner or  Kubla Khan.

The word impact also gives us an opportunity to understand etymology a little better because if you look it up in the OED you will notice a little asterisk beside the Latin word that it is supposed to have come from.  This is impactus and is supposed to be a participle of the root of our word “impinge”. 

The illuminating bit is that what the asterisk means is that no one has ever really come across this Latin word impactus so we can’t be absolutely sure it really was a Latin word.  It’s just that all the evidence seems to point to it.

I’ve talked before about JRR Tolkien and his association with The Oxford English Dictionary.

During his time there they were working on words starting with W, and one of the words he worked on was walrus.

The OED online in its newsletters section shows an image of some of JRR’s hand written notes concerning walrus and it is evident that he pondered over the word for some time. It is his work that is still reflected in the current OED entry.

There we learn that a walrus was called a walrus by 1655 but that as an animal it had been known long before and appeared with other names in the writings of Alfred the Great back around 893. At that time in Old English it was called not walrus but horschwael which we today might pronounce “horse whale.”

By reversing these words into “whale horse” we can see how the word walrus came about.

A walrus with its whiskered face, huge tusks, and baglike body  doesn’t look much like a horse but JRR goes on to speculate that there could have been confusion around what the name was in Old Norse since their word for a certain kind of whale was similar to “horse whale” and similar to their word for walrus.

An alternate name for a walrus that shows up in a few dictionaries—OED and the American Heritage Dictionary for example—is sea horse.

Morse was yet another name that appeared before walrus and seems to have spread to other languages only to drop out of use in English.  This word too is brought back to horse since it seems to have been formed on mo-horse.

So even though we might think of a sea horse as one of those little fishes with a horsey head and a curly tail—a species in which babies are hatched by the father—clearly people in the past didn’t make this association.

A lot of the dictionaries I looked at don’t even include the word hobbit.

Most of the ones that do credit JRR Tolkien as having dreamt up hobbits for his books The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings.

This is both understandable and believable.

But when I looked at Brewers Dictionary of Modern Phrase and Fable I got a hint of something more.  While most of the other sources say that hobbits were created by Tolkien, Brewers slyly says that they feature in his stories.

To get the deeper truth we need to burrow deeper into the hobbit hole and The Oxford English Dictionary is the place to do that.

The OED is in a unique position of authority because Tolkien actually worked there for a few years early in his career. Plus a later editor had studied under Tolkien’s professorship.

So in the late ‘60s when The Lord of the Rings was making its first rise to popularity the OED added hobbit as an entry.

How better to check out the etymology of the word than to ask its creator?

Except that JRR Tolkien denied having created the word.

He helped them define it as an imaginary people, small but human, whose name means ‘hole-dweller’ but did not claim credit for their invention.

No citations were found that predated Tolkien’s 1937 use in the book of the same name, so that’s what’s given as hobbit’s earliest usage in OED.

But since that time, as reported in an OED newsletter, the word has been found in a 19th century folklore journal.

So even though JRR couldn’t remember where he’d first heard of hobbits, it turns out his denial of inventing them was justified.

In August of 1826 Stanislas Baudry in Nantes, France introduced the idea of public transport to the world.

He did it a little bit by accident actually because what he was really trying to do was make it easier for customers to find their way to the public baths he owned and ran as his business.

The idea of giving people a ride was a big success but things didn’t exactly go as planned. The trouble was that everyone kept getting on and off the bus at all the stops between downtown and his bath house.

Stanislas was no dope though; he gave up on the public baths and instead began charging a flat fare to ride as far as a passenger wanted to go along the route.

The idea was so popular that people in other places heard about it and within 6 years busses were set up in London, Paris, Bordeaux, and Lyons.

Except they weren’t called busses, instead they were called “vehicle for all” which in French was voiture omnibus. In Latin omnis means “all.”

According to The Oxford English Dictionary Stanislas Baudry chose the name voiture omnibus because he knew of a local tradesman who was named monsieur Omnès and used the word play Omnès omnibus to publicize his business.

You could imagine a plumber named Everett putting up a sign advertising “Everett for everyone.”

Word travels fast—faster than public transit anyway—and it only took 3 years for the word omnibus to arrive in London. That’s half the time it took the omnibus service to arrive there.

I guess once omnibuses began operating in London, the people riding them could a afford to be a little lazier than they’d been before and so they quickly—in the same year, 1832 according to the OED—began abbreviating omnibus down to bus.