Twisted

I love etymology - the story of how words come to be words. For example, take the word "history," which is of course the combination of the two words "Hist" and "ory," neither of which mean anything because I'm just fooling.

We fast all night, from dinner time to gettin'-up time, so when it's time to get something in our tummy, we say it's time to BREAK our FAST, and then someone points out that we had a bag of pretzels around midnight, so the fast wasn't all that long, was it now?

Another interesting word: pretzel. (From here on, everything is factual. Even I have my limit on folly.) For years, wordsmiths have been saying that a monk invented some rolled up twisted dough and baked it as a little reward for kids who had said their prayers. The word "pretiola" is Latin for a little reward. And from that, we got "pretzel."

But some said pretzel came from the Latin "preces," meaning prayers.

But now comes a school of thought saying that we don't really associate pretzels with monks, but with Germans, whose word for pretzel is "bretzel." And scholars now say that "bretzel" came from "brezitella," which in turn came from the Larin "brachilatellum," the diminutive version of "brachiatum," a bread baked in the form of crossed arms.

Just like a pretzel!

As we begin a summer where no one knows anything about what's going to happen with schools, shopping, sports, food, politics, the economy, public safety and really, nothing at all, it's kind of nice to sit and have a beer and a pretzel or two and realize there are people whose mission in life is to figure out why we call them pretzels.

Now I want a pretzel.