[audio clip] “My name is Matt Mullenweg and an interesting word is slide.”

I met Matt Mullenweg at a recent event called WordCamp.

WordCamp wasn’t a meeting about words as you might expect in the context of this podcast for word lovers.  WordCamps are get-togethers where users of the blogging platform WordPress exchange words.

Matt Mullenweg founded WordPress and is big fancy international technology star, so I was pleased to get a word out of him.

The word slide itself doesn’t offer much in the way of interest, but the context in which it came to Matt to ask about it does offer a little food for thought.

Slide is one of those very oldest words.  Its roots go back (changing very little) for seven thousand years or so.  Back then of course there was no English or even Latin or Greek.  Those were the days of that theoretical language Indo-European.

Theoretical only because we have no written proof that there ever was such a language, and so all of its supposed words have been inferred (as has Indo-European itself) by all of the more modern words that have been amassed since writing was invented.

In the case of our word of the day slide, words with similar meaning and structure exist in languages as widely spread as Greek, Lithuanian, Latvian, Welsh, Russian, Czech, and Sanskrit.

The English versions can be traced back through Old English to ancient Germanic sources.

Being so very old and having changed not a lot in the intervening millennia goes along with a meaning that would be a common and unchanging human experience.  Way back when, just like now the concepts that the word slide applies to were commonly understood.

They were also commonly enough talked about so that everyone knew the right pronunciation and so even as many centuries went by, social pressures kept this word’s sound stuck to its meaning.

When Matt Mullenweg suggested the word he said that it fit so well in a scene from a movie.

In Fight Club the proponent meets an imaginary penguin who says “slide” to him.

When Matt brought this up there was ambiguity as to whether the penguin was supposed to have said “slide” or “sly.”  I checked this out and I see

1. that a YouTube video confirms the penguin quote as “slide”; and
2. several people on the web have debated whether it was sly or slide that the penguin said, and what the penguin meant by it.

Now, how could a penguin saying “slide” or “sly” fit so well with so much meaning in a movie?  I guess you’ll have to watch it yourself.

But it does give me a jumping off point for touching on the etymology of sly which isn’t so long lived or so unchanging as slide and so in some ways more fun.

Sly didn’t turn up in Old English but waited around until Middle English.

This isn’t because it came from French like so many other Middle English words.  It had Germanic roots like all those Old English words but instead of coming from the south with the Anglo-Saxons, it descended from the north with the Danes.

For centuries as English was becoming more uniform across England Old Norse kept creeping in from the occupation of northern England by the Vikings.

Those Vikings were pretty violent guys and so perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that

1. sly is related to the words slaughter and slay, and
2. when sly first appeared in English it had recently meant specifically a talent at hitting, and moreover that this was regarded as a positive personal attribute.

Maybe it should have been the word used in the movie Fight Club.

Today’s episode brought to you by my audio-book Global Wording – The Fascinating Story of the Evolution of English. Available in downloadable form from iTunes or Audible.com or as a CD from bookstores. For more information and a few samples, go to www.globalwording.com