OPINION

WATCH YOUR LANGUAGE! Second cousins are somebody’s great grandkids

(Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/Celia Storey)
(Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/Celia Storey)

I have to talk about family.

We likely all understand the meanings of mom, dad, son, daughter, brother, sister. Your mother's siblings are your aunts and uncles. You are your aunt's niece or nephew.

(An aside: Uncle comes from the Latin word avunculus, meaning your mother's brother. The word avuncular has come to mean kind and genial, as a proper uncle would be.)

Stepbrothers and half brothers are not the same. When your mom marries a man with a son, you gain a stepbrother.

A half brother doesn't mean a sibling missing a portion of himself. It means you two share one parent.

The subject of cousins is where it gets tricky. Do you know for sure what "second cousin once removed" means? Is that the same as a third cousin?

Here's how it goes. Ann and Beth are sisters. Ann has a child named Chris, and Beth has a child named Daniel.

Chris and Daniel are first cousins. When Chris has a child, Edward, and Daniel has child, Frank, those kids are each other's second cousins. Chris is first cousin to Daniel. Chris is first cousin once removed to Daniel's child, Frank.

Then Frank has a child named Henry. Henry is Chris' first cousin twice removed.

Henry is second cousin to Gary, Edward's son.

We understand grandparents and grandchildren, usually.

When my niece had a baby, I became a great-aunt. When I would say this aloud, I would say, "I'm a great-aunt!" It sounded like I was saying I was fantastic at being an aunt. But it just meant that my niece had a child.

And that baby is my grandniece, not my great-niece.

And I learned one more about family connections recently. If a man is named James Michael Martin and he names his child James Michael Martin, the child is a junior: James Michael Martin Jr. (And, please note, no comma is needed before the Jr.) However, if James Michael Martin, the elder, has a nephew named after him, the nephew is James Michael Martin II.

It would be the same if the child was named after a grandfather.

Women don't normally get those suffixes, which I think could be called chauvinistic. My mother was Norma, and my sister was Norma Jean. My dad would sometimes call my sister Norma Junior. But not officially.

GLITCH

Most people enduring a frustrating computer glitch — fearing that hours of work have been lost to the technological ether — don't take time to ponder where the word glitch came from. But my editor did. The word, of course, means a malfunction of some sort. The American Heritage Dictionary, in fact, calls it a minor malfunction. That's highly subjective. I can remember one computer glitch at my old newspaper that caused the gentlest man I've ever met to spew forth some choice profanities.

But I digress. The origin of glitch isn't positively known, but it could be from the Yiddish word glitsh, meaning a slip or lapse.

The word was apparently first used by astronaut John Glenn in his part of the book "Into Orbit," a 1962 book about the Mercury spaceflight program. It almost sounds as if it wasn't meant to become a word.

"[A] term we adopted to describe some of our problems was glitch," Glenn wrote.

The American Heritage Dictionary adds:

Glenn then gives the technical sense of the word the astronauts had adopted. "Literally, a glitch is a spike or change in voltage in an electrical current." The word may have already been in use by engineers and other specialists for some time, though. Later in the book, it is explained again and is simply said to be a slang word for a "hitch."

ANYMORE

I randomly researched the word anymore, and I learned much more than I expected.

You've heard, "Alice doesn't live here anymore." The anymore tells you that Alice did once live there, but not now. It's a shorter, easier way of saying, "Alice used to live here. Now, she doesn't."

Anymore is a negative polarity item. A polarity item is one that normally gets attached to either a negative or positive concept.

Ever, any and anything are other negative polarity items.

Floyd didn't eat any cookies. Here, it's negative because you wouldn't say, "Floyd ate any cookies."

Angela didn't want anything extra on her pizza.

I haven't ever been here.

A positive polarity item, as the name implies, appears with a positive concept.

Examples are some, would rather and already.

At the library, Bob found some quiet.

You know some is a positive polarity word because one wouldn't say, "At the library, Bob didn't find some quiet."

I would rather be traveling now.

I already ate dinner.

I certainly didn't know any of this polarity information. Maybe some of you did. In any case, I would say I use the words correctly. It's another example of how we learn complex aspects of the language that we didn't even know we knew.

Now get this. Anymore sometimes migrates over to positive polarity. Does that mean it's ambidextrous? That it defies gravity? That it's unabashedly fickle? I don't know.

In positive polarity sentences, anymore is used as if it were the phrase these days or nowadays.

Anymore, the Wendy's workers forget to omit the onions on my burger.

It rains daily anymore.

This usage is hard for me. I'll stick with "nowadays."

Sources include American Heritage Dictionary, Grammar Girl, University of Chicago. Reach Bernadette at

bkwordmonger@gmail.com

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