Words. Where they came from. How they shifted. Who benefits from the shift.
A living glossary of words whose meanings have shifted. Each entry: word, origin, original meaning, when it changed, who benefits from the change. Where a memo on the site unpacks a word at length, the entry links to it.
Entries listed in the order they were added — newest first.
M is also biomechanically the closed-mouth sound — lips sealed, voice vibrating internally. It is the sound the infant makes at the breast (mmm, mama, mère, māmā) and the sound of pleasure in tasting. It is the seed-syllable that closes Om in Hindu and Buddhist mantra. The letter for water is also the letter for the first sound the human mouth makes when something is contained, held, internal, wet. Not coincidence: design.
The MOR memo follows the m-r phoneme across five thousand years. A dedicated memo on the letter M itself — the hieroglyph, the closed-mouth sound, the water-symbol — is the natural sequel.
The deepest signature in human language, hidden in plain sight in every sentence we speak. Used dozens of times a day in the simplest of words — more — without anyone noticing it carries the weight of five thousand years.
The long-form companion. Traces the m-r phoneme across Sumerian, Akkadian, Egyptian, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Celtic, and Germanic sources — from Mount Moriah to the morel mushroom.
The Greek m-r branch of the MOR cluster, in full. Myrô (to flow), myra (sea), plemmyra (flood), myrios (countless), myrmê (a pre-Greek sea-fish), and the Myrmidons themselves. Achilles as the Bronze Age archetype of the m-r warrior. Companion to the North Inch memo.
The long-form memos on this site that trace a word or a name to its root.
The verse translated as “a wild ass of a man” — the oldest Greek reads agroikos anthrōpos, a man of the open country. The words, the versions, the household, and the dated entry of the bias. Part 1 of Bias Found, Bias Removed.
Following the MOR root through five thousand years — the sacred mountain in three traditions, the Amorites and Hammurabi, Greek morphē, and the Egyptian root for love.
Achilles is a man of the sea in every detail but the name — the buried Bronze Age m-r sea-meaning under the standard “ant-people” etymology of the Myrmidons.
Egypt’s primeval mound of creation, the capstone of every pyramid, and the phoenix that rose from it all carry one root — wbn, “to rise, to shine.” The Semitic word for “son,” ben, only sounds like it. The facts of both, the look-alikes the sound throws off across unrelated languages — Chinese, Sanskrit, even Tibetan Bön — and one open question, does anything older connect them, left for the reader to weigh.
A Norwegian sea-coast earl named Harald Fairhair — then his six sons scattered. One died, one failed, and four founded things that lasted: the earldom of Orkney, an Iceland bloodline that runs to a saint, the home seat, and the duchy of Normandy that took England. Rognvald the Wise and his sons, one by one.
An indentured girl off the Abigail, bought out of her bond for twenty pounds, who became the grandmother of Benjamin Franklin and ancestress of the Nantucket whalers — the Mary Morrell that Melville named in Moby-Dick. Her story, and where the Morrell name meets the Murrell line.
Border families and the Britons returning to their land — the deep roots of the Steward and Stewart name across the Anglo-Scottish frontier.
The Norman knights who crossed the border and fought for — not against — the Scottish crown.
13 November 1002 and 1093 — ninety-one years apart, two killings on the same saint’s day, linked in one chain from the massacre of the Danes to the death of a Scottish king.
A 1778 Northumbrian ballad — a princess turned into a dragon at Bamburgh, rescued by her brother — and the deep Brittonic gwyn root behind the names.