This is the Allusionist in which I, Helen Zotsman, hold language in my arms and say,

they're there, it's alright.

While secretly crossing my fingers behind its back.

Coming up in today's show, crushing news for pedants.

To warm up his and word history, I received the following email from Rose.

Hello, Helen.

I am five.

We are learning computers.

Why is it called login at the start?

Percy Rose, congratulations for being so competent at emails at such a young age.

Now, strap in because this explanation sounds like a lie, but apparently really isn't.

The first known written example of login in the computer sense is from 1963 when computing

was in its infancy.

But in the sense of entering information, log had already been in use for nearly 300 years,

stemming from sailors logging information into a ship's log book.

And why that book was called a log was because of the way they ascertained the ship's speed.

They'd throw a log overboard attached to a long line of rope with knots tied along it,

and as the ship moved away, the log would stay floating roughly in the same place, but

they'd let the rope unspool for a fixed amount of time by counting the knots that ran overboard.

They'd measure the distance travelled, divide it by the time, and thus calculate the speed,

which they'd then logged in the log book.

It's also why the unit of measurement for ship's speed is the knot.

...