939. When I say the word "tattoo," you probably think of body art, but "tattoo" has another meaning that's related to a famous Edinburgh festival that is happening this month. Plus, we look at why you should never stop writing (and reading).
939. When I say the word "tattoo," you probably think of body art, but "tattoo" has another meaning that's related to a famous Edinburgh festival that is happening this month. Plus, we look at why you should never stop writing (and reading).ding).
The "tattoo" segment was written by Samantha Enslen, who runs Dragonfly Editorial. You can find her at dragonflyeditorial.com.
The "aging and writing" segment was written by Roger J. Kreuz, associate dean in the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Memphis. Richard M. Roberts, a foreign service officer, also contributed. It originally appeared in The Conversation, and appears here through a Creative Commons license.
| Transcript: https://grammar-girl.simplecast.com/episodes/tattoo/transcript
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Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, and you can think of me as your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. This week, we'll talk about tattoos, and about why you should keep reading and writing as you age.
Let's get started.
by Samantha Enslen
When you say the word “tattoo,” most people think “body art.” You might picture a World War Two sailor with a heart on his bicep, inscribed with the word “mother.” You might see a tattooed lady from an old-time circus. Or you might think fondly of your favorite barista.
Chances are, you don’t hear this:
That’s the sound of a different type of tattoo.
You might be surprised to learn that the word “tattoo” has two different meanings, with two different origins.
Meaning 1: Tattoo as a permanent skin marking
The first refers to images or patterns permanently drawn on the skin. These are created by puncturing the skin and adding ink. Sometimes this is done with needles; sometimes, with bones or thorns. Sometimes the ink is introduced into a simple pinprick. Other times, it’s added into a scratch or even a knife slash.
But whether you think tattooing is cool or creepy, humans have been doing it since the dawn of civilization.
We’ve found tattoos on Egyptian mummies from 2000 BC. We’ve also found what might be tattoos on the “Iceman,” the mummified human found in the Alps and radio-carbon-dated back to 3000 BC. The Iceman’s back, left leg, and right ankle are marked with short blue lines. These may be scars from primitive surgeries, or they may be proper tattoos!
Although this practice is ancient, the word “tattoo” itself came into English in the 1700s. That’s when James Cook, a British captain, undertook three expeditions to the Pacific Ocean. He found and charted New Zealand, accidentally landed in Australia, and visited Jakarta and Tahiti.
He brought back huge amounts of navigational information to England. And, he brought back the Tahitian word “tatau,” (T-A-T-A-U) meaning to mark. He recorded this as “tattaw” in his journals. Over time, this became “tattoo” in English and “tatou” in French.
One final note: the original Tahitian word (“tatau”) may be an onomatopoeia, a word that imitates the sound it represents. In this case, “tat” may refer to the tapping sound a mallet makes when striking a needle made of wood or bone.
Meaning 2: Tattoo as a military drumbeat or bugle call
Now let’s jump to the other meaning of tattoo.
Remember this sound?
That’s a military tattoo. It’s a signal sounded by a drum or bugle and used to recall soldiers to their quarters at night.
This version of tattoo comes from the Dutch phrase “doe den tap toe,” meaning “to close the tap.” As in, to close the tap on a keg.
You see, back in the 1600s, much of Europe was tied up in the Thirty Years War. Perhaps because the war stretched out for so long, soldiers would often wander off to their local pubs during the day. In the Netherlands, drummers were sent into town every evening at 9:30 to call them back.
This drumbeat was also a signal to innkeepers: turn off your tap and kick the soldiers out! That’s where “doe den tap toe” – “close the taps” – came from. Over time, that was shortened to “tap too,” and eventually “tattoo.”
Today, these kinds of tattoos are still used in the military.
On U.S. Army bases, for example, a bugle signals key events throughout the day.
The meaning of a military tattoo has also expanded over time to include military music in general. This type of music is celebrated at festivals around the world that gather bagpipers, military bands, drill teams, and fife and drum corps. The most famous may be the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo. This month-long festival kicked off in 1950 and has been held yearly ever since.
So, that’s the skinny on the two types of tattoo. One marks your skin; the other marks the end of the day.
That segment was written by Samantha Enslen, who runs Dragonfly Editorial. You can find her at dragonflyeditorial.com.
//
This next segment is by Roger J. Kreuz.
When Toni Morrison died on Aug. 5 in 2019, the world lost one of its most influential literary voices.
But Morrison wasn’t a literary wunderkind. “The Bluest Eye,” Morrison’s first novel, wasn’t published until she was 39. And her last, “God Help the Child,” appeared when she was 84. Morrison published four novels, four children’s books, many essays, and other works of nonfiction after the age of 70.
Morrison isn’t unique in this regard. Numerous writers produce significant work well into their 70s, 80s, and even their 90s. Herman Wouk, for example, was 97 when he published his final novel, “The Lawgiver.”
Such literary feats underscore an important point: Age doesn’t seem to diminish our capacity to speak, write, and learn new vocabulary. Our eyesight may dim and our recall may falter, but, by comparison, our ability to produce and to comprehend language is well preserved into older adulthood.
In our book, “Changing Minds: How Aging Affects Language and How Language Affects Aging,” my co-author, Richard M. Roberts, and I highlight some of the latest research that has emerged on language and aging. For those who might fear the loss of their language abilities as they grow older, there’s plenty of good news to report.
Some aspects of our language abilities, such as our knowledge of word meanings, actually improve during middle and late adulthood.
One study, for example, found that older adults living in a retirement community near Chicago had an average vocabulary size of over 21,000 words. The researchers also studied a sample of college students and found that their average vocabularies included only about 16,000 words.
In another study, older adult speakers of Hebrew – with an average age of 75 – performed better than younger and middle-aged participants on discerning the meaning of words.
On the other hand, our language abilities sometimes function as a canary in the cognitive coal mine: They can be a sign of future mental impairment decades before such issues manifest themselves.
In 1996, epidemiologist David Snowdon and a team of researchers studied the writing samples of women who had become nuns. They found that the grammatical complexity of essays written by the nuns when they joined their religious order could predict which sisters would develop dementia several decades later. (Hundreds of nuns have donated their brains to science, and this allows for a conclusive diagnosis of dementia.)
While Toni Morrison’s writing remained searingly clear and focused as she aged, other authors have not been as fortunate. The prose in Iris Murdoch’s final novel, “Jackson’s Dilemma,” suggests some degree of cognitive impairment. Indeed, she died from dementia-related causes four years after its publication.
Our ability to read and write can be preserved well into older adulthood. [But] Making use of these abilities is important, because reading and writing seem to prevent cognitive decline.
Keeping a journal, for example, has been shown to substantially reduce the risk of developing various forms of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease.
Reading fiction, meanwhile, has been associated with a longer lifespan. A large-scale study conducted by the Yale University School of Public Health found that people who read books for at least 30 minutes a day lived, on average, nearly two years longer than nonreaders. This effect persisted even after controlling for factors like gender, education, and health. The researchers suggest that the imaginative work of constructing a fictional universe in our heads helps grease our cognitive wheels.
Language is a constant companion during our life journey, so perhaps it’s no surprise that it’s interwoven into our health and our longevity. And researchers continue to make discoveries about the connections between language and aging. For example, a study published in July 2019 found that studying a foreign language in older adulthood improves overall cognitive functioning.
A thread seems to run through most of the findings: In order to age well, it helps to keep writing, reading, and talking.
While few of us possess the gifts of a Toni Morrison, all of us stand to gain by continuing to flex our literary muscles.
That segment was written by Roger J. Kreuz, associate dean in the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Memphis. Richard M. Roberts, a foreign service officer, also contributed. It originally appeared in The Conversation, and appears here through a Creative Commons license.
And if you're interested in this topic, you may also enjoy an interview I did with author Bourne Morris back in 2020 when she was around 80 and publishing her fourth novel, "A Woman of Two Minds." Here's a short clip:
Bourne: And sometimes your best writing comes when you are older.
Mignon: Right. What advice do you have for people who have maybe been thinking about writing for a long time and suddenly for whatever reason they retired, they got laid off, their kids are out of the house, they find themselves with some more time, and they're thinking maybe now's the time. How do you sort of-
Bourne: Well, I would say if you have a book you want to write, write your book. The late Mike Land, who was a wonderful writer once said, "Have your baby, plant your garden, write your book." You should do what you really want to do. If you have the time to do it, I would say sit down and start to write. You may want to do an outline. I never do, although I always know how the book ends. I just don't always know what's going to happen in the middle.
Bourne: The other piece of advice I would give is what I used to tell my students, which is write it. Write it with all the mistakes, spelling mistakes, grammar mistakes. Write it with factual errors. Just write it from beginning to end and then go back and start to edit. Don't stop and edit every day when you're writing because you'll never get it finished.
If you want to hear more, that was episode 753, and I'll put a link in the show notes.
Finally, I have a familect story.
"Hi, Mignon. Luke here. I have a familect. I think it's a familect from my mother also when we asked what was the dinner. She didn't like that. She would get annoyed. also seems to be pretty common, and she would always tell us we're gonna have a 'caca frita' for dinner. We wouldn't want to translate it, but that was what the common answer was in the house cooking for."
Haha, Thanks, Luke, I can guess, and I'll leave it to the listeners to do so too.
If you want to share the story of your familect, a word your family and only your family uses, call the voicemail line at 83-321-4-GIRL. It’s in the show notes, and be sure to tell me the story behind your familect because that’s always the best part.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast, Thanks to our audio engineer, Nathan Semes, and our director of podcasts, Adam Cecil. Thanks also to our ad operations specialist, Morgan Christianson; our marketing associate, Davina Tomlin; and our digital operations specialist, Holly Hutchings, who is learning to cook fish — salmon and cod are next on the list.
And I’m Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl. That's all. Thanks for listening.
//
The following sources for the "tattoo" segment did not appear in the audio podcast but are included here for completeness.
Creswell, Julia. Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins. Tattoo. Oxford University Press; 3rd edition (September 22, 2021)
Encyclopedia Britannica. James Cook. https://www.britannica.com/biography/James-Cook (by subscription).
Encyclopedia Britannica. Tattoo. https://www.britannica.com/art/tattoo
Felicity Friedman, Anna. The Cook Myth: Common Tattoo History Debunked. https://tattoohistorian.com/2014/04/05/the-cook-myth-common-tattoo-history-debunked/
Oxford English Dictionary. Tattoo. Oed.com (by subscription).
Royal Museums Greenwich. Captain Cook, Sir Joseph Banks and tattoos in Tahiti. https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/captain-cook-sir-joseph-banks-tattoos-tahiti
The Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo. https://www.edintattoo.co.uk/
U.S. Army Bugle Calls. https://home.army.mil/stewart/my-fort/soldiers/bugle-calls