On Language; With a Euro in Her Pouch...
No matter what the bankers tell you at the Frankfurt headquarters of the European Monetary Union, the euro is already in circulation.
Aboriginal Australians have long been familiar with the Westralian rock kangaroo, which they call the uroo, waroo or yuro. English-speaking residents of that continent spell it euro: 'Wallaby, euro and dingo tracks,' wrote I. L. Idriess in a 1933 novel, 'showed how popular this cool rock-hole was.'
Those creatures, with their powerful hindquarters and front-loaded method of carrying offspring in pouches, will have to share their name with the European supercurrency in a few years. Residents of 11 countries will soon be disdaining francs, marks, guilders, escudos and pesetas, instead insisting their common currency is as 'sound as a euro.'
The Germans wanted to call it the euromark. The mark was the name of a German, English and Scottish weight traceable to the year 886; in 1946, the Deutsche mark replaced the Reichsmark and became the symbol of German financial stability. But the French preferred the ecu, acronym for the European Currency Unit (and an old silver French coin, similar to the English crown).
Germans thought ecu sounded too much like Kuh, German for 'cow,' likely to lead to such wordplay as 'cash cow' and 'curdling the currency.' Bonn countered with the franken -- a Germanization of the French franc -- but that struck many as too close to Mary Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein, not to mention his monster. The monnet had its moment, honoring Jean Monnet, the European unionist, but that suggestion sounded too much like the English money, and the Brits were not even embracing the new currency.
'The Germans insist on euro,' wrote Nathaniel C. Nash of The New York Times from Brussels in November 1995, a name their Finance Minister, Theo Waigel, 'floated in September when the finance ministers last met.'
And so the coinage was coined.
MILLENNIUM BUG
When a batter fans, baseball scorers put down the symbol K, probably from the distinctive letter in strike.
Creators of G.O.P. bumper stickers in 1952 sought to encapsulate three issues against the Democrats: Korea (an unended war), Communism (soft on) and Corruption (the 'mess in Washington'). They came up with K1C2. (The notion of a quasi-chemical symbol as bumper sticker was used again in 1964 to denote the name of Goldwater: AuH2O.)
In the years since, K -- from kilo, Greek for chillioi, thousand,' or 10 to the third power -- has most often come to mean kilobyte, strings of binary digits expressed by 2 to the 10th power, or 1,024. My son the E-commercialist says that if my computer doesn't boast a memory of 48 megabytes -- that's 49,152 kilobytes -- I should forget about it.
O.K. (coined in 1839): here comes Y2K (coined in 1995).
'I plead guilty to journalistic incompetence,' writes the unduly self-flagellating financial columnist Robert J. Samuelson, 'for ignoring what may be one of the decade's big stories: the Year 2000 problem. Among technical types it is shortened to the Y2K problem.'
As we content providers are aware, the world as we know it is coming to an end at midnight on Dec. 31, 1999. At that moment, the Times Square ball drops; couples embrace; killjoy mathematicians insisting the new millennium does not begin for another year are drowned out in the clack of celebrants' noisemakers; the ghost of Guy Lombardo reappears to play 'Auld Lang Syne' (which drunken etymologists explain is Scottish for 'Old Long Since'); computers that have not been properly rejiggered assume with perfect binary logic that the Gay Nineties are over and that we're going into the year 1900 and that Diamond Jim Brady is canceling our credit cards. What a moment!
This column understands its scope: at the moment of earthly doom, for example, its subject will be the origin of doomsayer and the pronunciation of Armageddon. Therefore, I will leave the nerdy technical reasons for the breakdown of expiration dates to chat-room eschatologists. (It has to do with space-hungry programmers in the 1960's leaving the first two digits off the year, so that 1965 was written as 65, and now the computer can't find the 19 to turn it to 20.) We deal here only with the linguistic roots of Y2K.
On Feb. 26, 1995, James Coates wrote in The Chicago Tribune about what was being called the Year 2000 Holocaust and the millennium bug: 'Once the code that was compiled with the millennium bug written into it is decompiled, it must be fixed to allow four digits rather than two in what is called the date field.'
On Feb. 28, 1996, a Y2K bulletin board appeared on the Internet. Its existence was noted in the world of Old Establishment Media by The Wall Street Journal on July 26, 1996. Peter de Jager, co-author with Richard Burgeon of Managing 00,' helped popularize the term among the netties, as did Dan Rather of the broadcast network netties. They accepted the old-fashioned symbol of K as kilo, 1,000, not as 2 to the 10th power, or 1,024.
If you don't cotton to Y2K, and don't have the space for the year 2000, there's always the Roman numeral MM. A candy company that produces M&M's (named after Forrest Mars and Bruce Murrie) has seized on this idea to appoint itself 'the official candy of the New Millennium.' If you don't want your fingers sticky with chocolate as the electronic balloon falls, grab a handful of those millennium bugs.