Richard writes:
> The kicker: the Bursar's office staff blamed the lost data on leap day.
If Richard thought his posting was off-topic, wait 'til you read this one :-).
The subject of this post is the evolution of the word "bursar". While it's
kind of an odd word that you don't hear much any more, it's also a very old
word, perhaps 3000-3500 years old now. In English, it means "treasurer",
although it literally means "bag-man", where the bag is a bag of money.
Bursar made its way into English from Middle Latin, shortened from
"bursarius", where it also meant treasurer. But the root word in Latin was
"bursa", meaning bag, which was derived from the even older Greek work,
"byrsa".
In modern-day English, we also get the word "purse" from bursa. Both p's and
b's are those phonemes called "plosives". They're formed in almost the same
way in the mouth (say "buh" and "puh"; you can feel the explosive quality of
the two consonants and you can feel where your tongue is when you say them),
so they have a very high cross-mutational rate as languages evolve over the
centuries. And, as you might guess, we also get the word "burst" from the
root Latin.
However, we still use the word "bursa" in its orginal form, too. You have
bursae (sacs of synovial fluid) in all of your major joints, and
inflammations of those bags are called bursitis.
Spanish took a slightly different course in its vulgarization of Latin. L's
and r's are both "liquid laterals" and they too have a high cross-mutational
rate, thus "bursa" became "bolsa" in Spanish, again meaning (money) bag, but
now most commonly meaning "stock market", as in Bolsa de Madrid or Bolsa, S.A.
I told you this was wildly off topic. The problem is that I truly enjoy this
kind of stuff. It allows you to put all of this high-speed technological
evolution in "internet time" in perspective, especially when it leads to you
realize that the words "computer" and "composter" mean exactly the same thing
in Latin (both mean the "thing that puts together"). It's from this
similarity of root origin that I presume we that got the saying, "garbage in,
garbage out."
Wirt Atmar
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