The two I have in mind are the
peninsula and the
penumbra. How did I get here? I passed a car with the interesting vanity plate
GOINGUP.If this car hadn’t also had a sticker that mentioned the Upper Peninsula, that is to say Michigan’s UP, I might have thought that the plate’s owner was promoting his or her own upward mobility. But that second sticker informed me that this family probably travels north on beautiful weekends. But then, passing on, the word
peninsula got stuck in the grooves of my mind (that happens on walks) and I couldn’t trace the origin of that
pen. By the time I got home, I’d added
penumbra to the list—and I’d come to wonder if the
insula and the
umbra had the same or a different kind of pen. Online Etymology Dictionary to the rescue. (Must remember to make a donation to OED—I use it so much!) The pen in these two instances turns out to be of Latin origin. The word is
paene, meaning
almost. Almost an island. Almost a shadow. And here I was hoping, instead, that the pen was mightier even than the island. Not so. And as for the pen itself, it also comes from the Latin, the word
penna, feather. Light as a feather and mightier than the sword.
