PENCILS ONLY FOR ME !

One of the reasons I enjoy researching word histories is the regular discovery that some things I take for granted just aren't so. Like the connection between pens and pencils. After all, the words sound similar, the objects themselves look about the same, and they are used for roughly the same purpose. Common sense suggests that they have the same linguistic roots, and that they're just two slightly different versions of the same thing... Strike one for common sense. The word pen had already been borrowed into Japanese 200 years ago, along with the object itself. But what did a pen of that era look like? Basically... a feather! The word made its way into English long ago, originally from the Latin penna, for 'feather, wing,' and for over a 1000 years pens were indeed made of feathers, cut into appropriate shapes for handling and holding ink. Quill pens, usually of goose feathers, were used in western countries until about a hundred years ago. What we think of as pens today are mainly the results of 19th C. solutions to two problems: quills are relatively soft, and so tend to wear out fairly quickly, and they have to be continually dipped in ink. So a pen was originally a feather. What about the pencil? A kind of little pen? Wrong again! In fact, for most of its 600-year history in English, the word referred to a small, fine-pointed brush used in painting. It comes from penicillus, the diminutive form of the Latin word for tail, penis, and meant, literally, 'little tail.' (This same Latin word gives us penicillin, from the brush-like shape of the Penicillium mold from which it is produced.) Now if a pencil was referred to as a 'lead pencil' in English, then certainly the Japanese word enpitsu must be a direct translation: en (namari) 'lead' + hitsu (fude) 'brush'. Why else would they make the same 'mistake'? Strike two for common sense. Enpitsu apparently dates back to the 13th or 14th C., for a type of powdered lead-based ink, used with a brush, and with no connection to the English word pencil. The loan-words penshiru, ri-do peneshiru (lead pencil), and penseru appear in Meiji documents, but today enpitsu has replaced them all in regular use, with one exception: While I personally wondered why a mechanical pencil is called sha?pu-pen (sharp pen) in Japanese, most Japanese are probably aware that it's just another case of word-shortening, from the original form, sha?pu-penshiru, dating back some 30 years. So now I've learned that pens were feathers and pencils were brushes, and once more that words with similar shapes and meanings don't necessarily share their linguistic roots. That a Japanese 'lead brush' was not related to an English 'lead pencil,' and that only one of them has anything to do with lead at all. And that a 'sharp-pen' was never a pen. Once again, my own common sense has proved an inadequate substitute for research, and the history of words has led to more interesting discoveries... about things we take for granted. http://www.trussel.com/ Well, I always disliked pens... never longed to have them, and in the 5th grade I remember kids getting all those different coulored pens... and it didn't fascinate me at all...And I remember having a bad handwriting while using them,,, even up untill now...I guess this has to do with my "freaking out" syndrome ! ; )I'm serious... I've always had this "in-complete" illnesssssss !OK... let me elaborate more...whenever I park the car for instance, I feel like I forgot something, and have to look back thru its glass to be sure I didnt forget anythin' !!!!Whenever I read a book, I can't complete it... I get tooooooo attached that I don't want to finish reading it !!!!!A-N-Y-H-O-W,,,THANK GOD FOR CREATING THE MAN WHO INVENTED PENCILS ;)