penitent, turbulent, multiplex!

A couple of phrases that caught my attention recently, and I want to scribble down before I forget:

Rank and File: In case you haven’t heard it before, ‘rank and file’ refers to the people that compose the ‘main body of members of an organization’ (thanks to google define). This one bothers me because I still haven’t really been able to figure out where it comes from. In military parades, ‘…a rank is a line of troops standing shoulder to shoulder and a file is one in which they stand one behind the other’ (ref). But, this doesn’t tell me how the terms ‘rank’ and ‘file’ originally came to take on these meanings.

Piecemeal: This one comes up a lot in Easterly’s book, since he’s so fond of initiatives that do their work in several small steps. The ‘meal’ part of the word supposedly comes from the Germanic ‘maelaz’, which means ‘measure’. So this literally means ‘measured piece by piece’. See this site for a terse explanation of the whole thing.

I wasn’t even looking for most of these ones, but somehow I ran across the stories of the origins anyhow, and I thought they were interesting enough to merit sharing them. (Admittedly, two of the three are phrases rather than words. Oops.)

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Three different words caught my attention recently, and I found myself wondering about their origins. I did a very shallow investigation (ie web-only, so don’t put too much stock in it), and this is what I came up with…

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