So I was searching YouTube for some English major rap songs (don’t ask) and found, much to my chagrin, that not only have people made quite a few English major rap videos, but numerous people have already beaten me to my long-held dream of writing and recording a rap song about Geoffrey Chaucer (in Middle English).

One, though, really puts me in my place. His name is Baba Brinkman, and, although he raps in modern English, this is some of the most brilliant English major rapping I have ever seen. This was performed live at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2005. (The second and third are the best, in my opinion.)

The word pariah, meaning an outcast or any person or animal that is generally despised or avoided, comes from the Tamil word paraiyar, the plural of paraiyan, which literally means “drummer.”

The Semicolon died this week at the age of 417 from complications of irrelevancy and misuse.

And Now He’s Dead: Semicolon; Punctuation Mark

Fun words and their origins:

Karaoke – The fusion of two Japanese words: kara (“empty”) and oke (“orchestra”).

Sarcasm – From the late Latin sarcasmus, which comes from the Greek sarkasmos, which comes from sarkazein—literally, “to bite the lips in rage.”

Cute – A variation of acute, first appearing in the early 17th Century.

Sardonic – Variation of earlier sardonian, alluding to a Sardinian plant, which, when eaten, was supposed to produce convulsive laughter ending in death.

Angst – A German word that has been around, in one form or another, as long as the language has been around. The original word comes from the Indo-European root angh-, meaning “Tight, painfully constricted, painful.” Other derivatives include anguish, hangnail, and anxious.

Sin – Originally from the Indo-European root es–, meaning “to be.” Other derivatives include yes, essence, absent, and is.

Vagina – From the Latin vagina, meaning “sword sheath.” (This one just begs a feminist reading.)

San Diego – From the German sandiego, which of course means “a whale’s vagina.”