Words, Words, Words
I love Reader’s Digest. It has so many interesting articles – positive and heartwarming, but also updated health information and other current topics. My favorite sections, as you might expect, are the funny comments and the puzzle sections. One of my favorite puzzles is a section called “Word Power.”
In the February, 2021, issue, we had to know words for curved shapes, like ellipse, cupola, and oculus (oh yes, I missed some of the definitions). One of the extra bits of information was a brief history of the symbol for zero. I think it’s interesting that the zero shape may be a circle or an oval – apparently, either is acceptable, although using just a circle could be confused with the letter “O” (one reason a zero is often shown with a diagonal line through the symbol – to distinguish it from O).
Another tidbit was the origin of the word zero (quoted from the article): “[T]he word zero comes from the Latin zephirum and the Arabic sifr (“empty”). For a term that means, well, nothing, it has a lot of synonyms: cipher, zilch, naught, and nil, to name a few.”
“Some sports have their own terms: baseball gave us ‘goose egg’ (to mean a team scored no runs), tennis uses ‘love’ to mean no points.” Why love? The article says it’s probably from the idea of playing for nothing but ‘love of the game.’
Hah! How many of you sporty types out there don’t care if you score any points because you are simply playing for the love of the game?
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