Idea Sandbox

The original title for this was “Origin of the word: NEWS” - a post about a novel way I just learned the origin of the word “news.” Then I did some research and found out I had bum information.

My 2-XL* told me a trivia question today.

He said that the origin of the word NEWS comes from the points on the compass. N, S, E and W. I thought that was very interesting - and pretty cool that I learned something from a kid’s toy at 36 years old…

Then I did some fact checking… and the origin of the word NEWS is NOT from the points on the compass.

According to a website called the Word Detective:

The theory that “news” is an acronym whose letters stand for the four points of the compass — North, East, West and South — is an attractive, superficially plausible theory, but, like many attractive theories, it is nonsense. In truth, “news” in English seems to have come about because someone noticed that the French word for “news or current events” is “nouvelles” (which is simply the plural of the French word for “new”) and decided we should do the same thing in English. So there’s no acronym in “news,” but we do get to blame the illogic of the word on the French, which is better than nothing.

I guess we’ve made some discoveries since the late ’70s.

*Who or what is 2-XL?

2-XL was a kids toy in the mid/late-70s made by Mego, which helped kids “to excel” (2-XL) through trivia and facts. I never had one as a kid, but had played with one. A couple years ago I found one on eBay…

2-XL’s voice is what I clearly remembered and what drove me to find one. It’s some guys voice from New York, spoken robotically and slightly sped up. Has a thick accent for a robot.