From Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley.
I'm John McWhorter, and today I want to do a fantasia.
I want to do a fantasia on a word that happened to strike me recently that might seem rather mundane,
and that word is business.
Some people might think that just the very concept of business,
if you're going to be kind of aristocratic, is mundane.
But you know,
it's actually a beautiful example of how much there is in pretty much every single word.
Language is such a buzzing thing.
It's such a busy thing, you might even say.
And if we're going to talk about business, then we have to start with busy.
And if you think about it, that...
Even there,
it's not exactly intuitive because we don't always think about the relationship between the words.
But let's start with busy.
For one thing, it's a word of rather mysterious origin.
Proto-Indo-European,
that grandfather to most of the languages of Europe and a great many eastward in Iran and India.
Proto-Indo-European had thousands of words that have been reconstructed based on comparing all of the languages.
Busy is one of those where it only exists in the Germanic branch, the Germanic branch of the nine,