(Roughly) Daily

From Colin Gorrie, how our world also shapes our language– and in the example he uses, also our sense of duty…

Debt is old. It’s older than writing. The first writing system, Sumerian cuneiform, evolved out of marks used for accounting. From the beginning, writing was used to track who had what, and, crucially, who owed what to whom.

The influence of debt also extends to language more generally. In many languages, including English, the experiences of owing and being owed provided the blueprint for more abstract notions of duty, necessity, and obligation.

Words meaning ‘to owe’ developed into abstract expressions of obligation so often that it’s useful to have a name for the phenomenon. I call it the owe-to-ought pipeline, named after one of the clearest cases of this development. The word ought is, in fact, nothing but the old past tense form of owe.

This pipeline shows us something about how language changes and develops over time. First, it shows how easily words can slide from one meaning to another, although that’ll be no surprise to anyone who has watched the development of slang over a few decades.

The more important lesson owe-to-ought teaches us has to do with where grammar comes from. Wait, don’t run away! This isn’t a grammar lesson. What I want to show you is how languages create grammar — a collection of abstract meanings such as plurality and verb tense — out of the concrete realities of our shared human experience.

And what human experience is more common than debt?

This is the story of three families of words: owe, should, and the word debt itself. Understand these three families, and you’ll understand how the English language built its way of expressing duty, necessity, and obligation — not to mention guilt and sin — out of the raw materials of accounting…

A case study in how our vocabulary (and our sense of obligation) evolved: “How debt shaped the way we speak,” from @colingorrie.bsky.social.

* Rita Mae Brown

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As we acknowledge our antecedents, we might recall that it was on this date in 1950 that Rose Marie Reid was granted one of her several patents, US2535018A. A swimwear designer and manufacturer, Reid has already been the first swimsuit designer to use inner brassieres, tummy-tuck panels, stay-down legs, elastic banding, brief skirts, and foundation garments in swimwear, and the first designer to introduce dress sizes in swimwear, designing swimwear for multiple sizes and types of bodies, rather than just producing one standard size. This patent was, in its way, even more revolutionary– it was for a one-piece bathing suit made of elastic fabric “embodying a novel construction for causing it to snugly fit the body of a wearer in a flattering manner [that would] shape and support portions of the body of the wearer in areas of the bust and abdomen in a flattering manner without discomfort or impedance to free movements of the body.” The elastic fabric and elastic securing bands were designed to enable the garment to be put on without having buttoned openings which would “detract from the appearance of the garment.”

Reid assigned her patent to her company and enjoyed huge sales success, in part due to her impact in Hollywood and the motion picture industry. Famous screen actresses (e,g, Rita Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe, Jane Russell, and Rhonda Fleming) wore her swimsuits. And her suits also appeared in several California beach party films from the late 1950s and the early 1960s, including Gidget, Muscle Beach Party, and Where the Boys Are.