Kitten

Today Joey is taking the kitten to get tested for diseases. I would do it except that I have to work right during the time the vaccine clinic happens, which is also when they do the testing.

Joey had to put down a name for the kitten at the clinic and he chose Yorick. It's a strange name, I know. He got it from a comic book he and I both read that I loved. It was the name of the main character. I don't read many comics--only the ones Joey recommends because he knows my taste so well. Thus far, he hasn't been wrong. :) Then again, I've only read a handful total, so there weren't all that many opportunities for him to BE wrong.

So the kitten tested negative for Feline AIDS and Feline Leukemia, which is good news. But he also was found to have ear-mites and ringworm. No good. So Joey bought some meds for him that we will administer once a day for the next four weeks. Since ringworm is so contagious, we will have to isolate Yorick away from all the other animals, until he is free and clear. Additionally, we have been washing our hands every time we have contact with him, which we will continue to do.

And now, a snippet from a paper I am writing for another class, History of the English Language. It is quite interesting, but so much info!

Candidly, Cantankerous

It is probably safe to say that for a majority of the words in the English language, we know the origins with fair precision. Or at the very least, we have some semblance of the origin. Often, the exact route of a word arriving in English is unknown, due to many Indo-European languages having the same secondary (after Proto Indo European) root language, such as Latin lending itself to the romance languages. Some words have a very ambiguous origin, practically unknown, which allows for many suppositions. “Cantankerous” is one such word.
Dating back to 1772, cantankerous was first recorded in the play She Stoops to Conquer by Irish author Oliver Goldsmith. Because Goldsmith’s play is the first recorded evidence of the word, some propose that it was Goldsmith who coined it. Strangely enough, this play came at the very end of his career, with his death following only two years later (Barrett, 235). Apparently the word hadn’t been used in his previous works, which could further support the idea that Goldsmith himself did indeed give it life, or could be taken to mean he stumbled upon it very late in his lifetime. According to Evans Bergen, author of Comfortable Words, it could very well be a dialect word Goldsmith picked up (Bergen). Bergen also thinks the word cantankerous suggests “one all cankered and tanked up with rancor.” That clearly makes sense, as “cankered” and “tanked” combined would produce something like “cantankerous,” but it still doesn’t explain how Goldsmith arrived at this particular word, this particular order of syllables. Bergen further posits that the word is used freely in speech, but rarely in formal writing, which would explain its appearing only a handful of times in texts between 1772 and 1886 (OED).