Page 48 - Young Wise

Yeşim USTAOĞLU

WORD ETYMOLOGY
WORD ETYMOLOGY

Are you ready to dig deeper? From the ‘ships’ ‘ships’ steered by your
GPS to the ‘tiny moths’‘tiny moths’ hidden in your computer code, the
language of technology is full of surprises. Let’s explore!

do this, he invented these tiny digital icons
and named them ‘emoji’.
It comes from the Japanese words
‘e’ (picture) + ‘moji’ (character/letter).
It literally means ‘picture-letter’. We use
them every day to show how we feel
BUG (COMPUTER GLITCH)
without using words.
NAVIGATION (GPS)
Why do we say there is a ‘bug’ in a
computer when it crashes?
What do your car’s GPS and a ship have in
common? In 1947, a scientist named Grace Hopper
was working on a giant computer.
Long before satellites, people had to find
their way across giant, empty oceans and Suddenly, it stopped working. When she
‘drive’ their ships using stars. opened the machine, she found a real
‘moth’ (a small flying insect) stuck in the WEB (THE INTERNET)
It comes from the Latin words ‘navis’ (ship) hardware! She taped the moth into her Why do we call the Internet a ‘web’?
and ‘agere’ (to drive/to move). Whether logbook and wrote: “First actual case of a
you are in a boat, a car, or walking with a bug being found.” While Thomas Edison Think about a spider. It spins a complex
phone, you are still ‘driving your ship’ to made the word ‘bug’ popular for technical pattern of silk where every string is
find your way home. problems in the 1870s, this real moth made connected to another. In 1989, Tim
it famous forever in computer history. Berners-Lee created a system where
information pages were linked to each
It comes from the Middle English word other, just like those silk strings.
‘bugge’, used for insects. Even though
It comes from the Old English ‘webb’,
computer problems are now just errors in
meaning ‘woven fabric’.
code, we still call them ‘bugs’ because of
that one little moth. We call it the ‘World Wide Web’ because
it connects the whole world in one giant,
AVATAR invisible net of information.
Did you know your digital character has a
very spiritual history?
Long before video games, people in
EMOJI
ancient India used this word to describe
a ‘descent’. It was used when a powerful Does the word ‘emoji’ come from the
being would take a physical form to come English word ‘emotion’?
TABLET
down to Earth. The answer is surprisingly no! Most people
Did people use tablets thousands of years
It comes from the Sanskrit word ‘avatāra’, think it comes from the word ‘emotion’, ago?
meaning ‘descent’. In games or social but that’s a coincidence! In the late 90s,
media, an ‘avatar’ is the digital form you Shigetaka Kurita wanted a way to share Yes, but they weren’t electronic! In ancient
take to enter a virtual world. information quickly on small screens. To Mesopotamia and Egypt, students and
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