Today, across the dailies
Three daily surfaces I run, each on its own audience — a word and where it came from, a U.S. patent worth looking at, a paradox worth re-reading. Three independent rotations; this page is the editorial home that pulls today's pick from each. The dailies live where their readers find them; this is where they sit together.
window
The English word for window is a Viking word, and a literal one — Old Norse <em>vindauga</em>, "wind-eye." It came into English in the early Middle English period and displaced two older Anglo-Saxon compounds, <em>ēag-þyrel</em> ("eye-thirl," eye-hole) and <em>ēag-duru</em> ("eye-door"). The Norse compound won partly because the Norse settlers had glass earlier and named the thing in their own kitchens, partly because the metaphor is sharper — a window is not an eye-shaped hole, it is the place the wind comes through where the eye also goes. The <em>thirl</em> of the older English compound now survives in one word only: <em>nostril</em>, "nose-thirl." Underneath sit two of the deepest PIE roots: <em>*h₂weh₁-</em>, "to blow" (giving English <em>wind</em>, Latin <em>ventus</em>, Greek <em>aer</em>), and <em>*h₃ekʷ-</em>, "to see, the eye" (giving English <em>eye</em>, Latin <em>oculus</em>, Greek <em>ōps</em>, the Cyclops, the optic nerve, autopsy). The window is the wind and the eye, compounded by people who had glass.
Separable Fastener
The zipper. Sundback was an electrical engineer hired by Whitcomb Judson's failing 'Clasp Locker' company in Meadville, Pennsylvania; in 1913 he reinvented the entire mechanism around the now-familiar interlocking-tooth design. The U.S. Army bought 24,000 in 1918 for flying suits. The word 'zipper' didn't exist yet — B.F. Goodrich coined it in 1923 for the sound the fastener made on rubber boots. Fashion adoption was slow: zippers replaced buttons on men's trousers only in the 1930s.
What the Tortoise Said to Achilles
Achilles offers the inference: if A and B are true, then Z is true; A and B are true; therefore Z. The Tortoise refuses Z without first being granted, as a premise, the rule itself.
Achilles obliges and adds C: if A, B, and C are true, then Z. But now the Tortoise demands rule D, the rule that lets you go from A, B, C to Z. And so on, forever. Carroll’s point is that you cannot prove an inference by adding the inference to the premises — at some point you have to act on the rule rather than describe it. The paper, three pages long in *Mind*, quietly demolishes the idea that logic is purely a matter of formal premises. There has to be a place where the rule is just followed. Wittgenstein, half a century later, made this the central problem of his later philosophy: no rule can determine its own application without already presupposing the practice of applying it.