A chaotic Monday

A writer’s head is a chaotic landscape. ::understatement delivered:: One simply wishes to fly to a war zone in a helicopter. ::exaggeration delivered::

Writers let their thoughts wander all over the place and sometimes, they string along incredibly random bits of information. They do this to stumble across a new idea which is nothing but some thread which links existing ideas together.

Do you want to see what it feels like sometimes?

Let’s start by thinking about flying.

Just me?

Fine, let’s try the next best option. Let us take a metaphorical helicopter.

This word 'helicopter' is a complicated bub. It isn’t but I am going to have some fun with it anyway.

What could they have named it after?

• A helix shaped lens? ~ Helic-opter

• The twenty birds of Hades? ~ Hell-ico-pter

• Some naughty nerd that went, “Ohh! I want to lick that person (a her).” ~ He-llic-opt-‘er

• Is it someone who wants to reach Helios? ~ Helios-opter

One conversation with the etymology friend later, it is none of the above, obviously.

Helicopter comes from two Greek words helix (spiral) and pteron (wing) which underwent an etymological phenomenon called rebracketing* and became helicopter from the French word hélicoptère.

During World War II, American soldiers were struggling against the Japanese soldiers who knew the land (and who knew how to fight with or without weapons). They’d sneak in, do some Yankee killings, and hide. Americans were screwed.

Then they came up with a little thing – lollapalooza (it is a Shibboleth, an identification codeword). Courtesy of the phonetical fact that many native Japanese pronounce –L as an –R, in many places (in the Pacific), the war turned in America’s favour simply because the bunker passwords were lollapalooza and the Japanese soldiers never got the pronunciation right (because phonetically, they didn’t hear the difference).

During the Cold War, some spy games were afoot. Instead of using clandestine trickery, the Soviets used something simple to recognise American spies - Staples. The Americans had passports stapled with stainless steel pins whereas the Soviets had rusted Staples because the Soviet Union didn’t use stainless steel.

On a serious note, this is indeed what free writing looks like. I wrote this after responding to a message from a friend, Hercules Voridis, who shared some sources on, “sleep and death flew (you had said fleeting) deities in ancient Greece.”

Thinking about flying Gods who might be responsible for fleeting things led me to this line-of-thought which is such a random thing to post but this is how good ideas begin - this look chaotic and trashy.

Don’t let that stop you. Keep at it!

*In case you didn’t know, rebracketing is a when a historical word changes its associated morpheme (when we add come + -ing to make coming). For helicopter, the -pteron became -ptere.

**In learning Japanese, this sound sequence of -ra,-ri,-ru,-re,-ro is the culprit, in my opinion, to the native Japanese not hearing the -L sound. I don’t know this for a fact - this is a theory.