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From BookSmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley.

I'm John McWhorter, and today I want to do a Fantasia.

I want to do a Fantasia on a word that happened to strike me recently,

that might seem rather mundane in that word is business. Some people might think

that just the very concept of business, if you're going to be kind of aristocratic, is mundane.

But, you know, it's actually a beautiful example of how much there is in pretty much every single word.

Language is such a buzzing thing. It's such a busy thing,

you might even say. And if we're going to talk about business, then we have to start with busy.

And if you think about it, that even there is not exactly intuitive, because we don't always think

about the relationship between the words. But let's start with busy.

For one thing, it's a word of rather mysterious origin.

Proto-Indo-European, that grandfather to most of the languages of Europe

and a great many eastward in Iran and India,

Proto-Indo-European had thousands of words that have been reconstructed based on

comparing all of the languages.

Bizzy is one of those where it only exists in the Germanic branch, the Germanic branch of the

nine, or depending on how you count it, 11 branches of the Indo-European language family.

Only German, Dutch, etc., have cognates,

as we call it, of this word busy. So it's a mystery. It doesn't go back to that language spoken

...