Friday, 6 May 2016
10:59 AM
Poll: the reason we love Fridays: a) weekend is near! b) time for more words. Haha.
 For a new-to-me word this week I have monotasking, a kind of obvious but still useful variant on/backformation from multitasking. This was the subject of a recent article in The New York Times, whose provocative title was "Read This Story Without Distraction (Can You?)." (As it happened, I was eating lunch when I encountered the article, so … no.) The author of the NYT piece didn't invent the term; it's in the dictionary and listed as being from the 1990s. Certainly the idea of focusing on just one task at a time is not new. I'm sure it was known to the ancients, but it's also been explored in latter days in terms of work productivity and the flow experience. Still, it's probably useful to have a term for this that we can use in lifestyle advice articles.
This week's etymological investigation was inspired by something I read in William Renquists's little book on the history of the Supreme Court. Here he's discussing his first visit to the court as a brand-new clerk:The courtroom itself was divided by the traditional "bar"—this one of ornate brass—separating the part of the room reserved for lawyers admitted to the practice before the Court from that to which the general public was admitted. When I read this I thought, no, really? Is that the origin of being "admitted to the bar" and "passing the bar exam" and such? The OED basically says yes:A barrier or partition separating the seats of the benchers or readers from the rest of the hall, to which students, after they had attained a certain standing, were ‘called’ from the body of the hall, for the purpose of taking a principal part in the mootings or exercises of the house. This literal sense was expanded to mean the court itself (trial at bar == "in open court") and to refer to associations of lawyers, as in "bar association." This sense of bar apparently also gave us the British term barrister.
 See that brass bar? That's the one.
It's odd to me how I've seen this word hundreds or thousands of times and never wondered where it came from. Or that it might have such a literal origin.
Bonus etymology! Yesterday Ben Yagoda explored the surprising history of the word gobbledygook and uncovers an origin that I can almost guarantee will surprise you and possibly nonplus you.
Like this? Read all the Friday words.
[categories]
Friday words, language
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