WRONG, adj., adv. This word comes from Late Old English wrang, which meant “twisted, crooked, wry” and is in turn from Old Norse rangr or *vrangr, which meant the same thing but could also mean “unjust.”
The Online Etymology Dictionary has this to say about how we form the opposite of “right”:
Latin pravus was literally "crooked," but most commonly "wrong, bad;" and other words for "crooked" also have meant "wrong" in Italian and Slavic. Compare French tort "wrong, injustice," from Latin tortus "twisted."
And on the other hand—literally—our word for “right” also comes from a word that means “straight” (Latin rectus, yes like rectum). So for thousands of years, people have been associating straightness with rightness and crookedness with wrongness. I’m sure that can’t possibly have any damaging implications!
“Wrong” came up in conversation as part of a question about words that start with wr- in English. The w represents a sound we used to pronounce and no longer do, which is the case for most silent letters. The way we spell in English is like a fossil record of how we used to speak. (When linguists talk about “fossilization,” they are usually talking about grammatical features like prefixes that are no longer productive or words that only exist in particular idioms, but it’s also a useful concept for thinking about spelling. Or, if you prefer, you can think of these silent letters as Ghosts of English Past.)
You can see in the paragraph at the beginning that Old Norse rangr was probably *vrangr (this asterisk means we don’t have a written example), which gives you an idea of how speakers might have pronounced it. Over the course of several centuries, English speakers simplified a lot of the consonant clusters that used to begin words. So wr- became r- and kn- became n- in speech, but not in writing. Not all Germanic languages went through this process to the extent that English did. In German, “Knie” (knee) sounds like it looks.
The case of wr- words is especially cool, it turns out. A lot of my search results on this subject were from sites teaching English as a foreign language, or sites teaching English literacy, and here’s a passage from Cracking the ABC Code:
An unpronounced ‘w’ is most commonly followed by the letter ‘r’ (wrap, wrist, wrestle, write, wring). These words usually refer to twisting or distorting. To ‘wrap’ is to twist paper, your ‘wrist’ can twist, ‘writing’ is twisting the shape of letters, to ‘wreck’ is to distort or twist an item out of shape.
We’re back to twisted things again! With the exceptions of “write” and “wreck,” all the words cited above can be traced back to a single Proto-Indo-European root, *wer- (2) meaning “to turn, to bend.” This root is also where we get “wrong” and “wry.” Anyway, I had never thought about the fact that so many wr- words cover common semantic ground, which is very cool.
In Capital-R Romance this week, I read and watched a bunch of stuff in French in preparation for teaching, but that’s boring. More importantly, I watched Los Espookys on HBO, which is a comedy about a group of horror technicians, very cute and queer and mostly in Spanish. Totally worth your time if you have HBO access.
This week in small-r romance, I read
Grand Theft NYE (het? m/bi? f, both cis, contemporary, erotic, novella) by Katrina Jackson. I love a heist! And Cleo, a tall, thick Black woman who is totally cool and confident, is such a lovable scammer. She accidentally falls for the head of security while she’s in the middle of a job. They have one memorable, steamy night together and then she walks out with his watch and his car the next morning, and he spends six months tracking her down. Outstanding. Content warnings: sex, mentions of parental illness and death.
The AI Who Loved Me (m/f, both cis and het?, sci-fi) by Alyssa Cole. This is so fun and funny and of course it’s also very sexy and the worldbuilding has such incredible commentary on the future (and the present, oops: “the private sector mail service is on strike again and using USPS means I might never receive it—HiveMail kneecapped all their infrastructure decades ago”) and on top of all that, it’s beautiful. I am pretty much always into “non-human character tries/learns to be human” as a trope. This line in particular really got me: “Is this what it feels like to be human? To carry the weight of the knowledge that your greatest strength will, at some point, not be great enough?” Oyyyyyy. Anyway, this book is perfect. Content warnings: sex, PTSD, panic attacks.
The House in the Cerulean Sea (m/m, both cis and gay, fantasy) by TJ Klune. This is a whimsical fantasy story about two eccentric, forty-something gay men raising a passel of magical children together, and it is delightful. Such good found family vibes. Content warnings: abuse (in the past), orphanages, prejudice (against magical creatures), the main character has negative thoughts about his weight. [Update: In light of an essay that Klune wrote where he said this book was inspired by the Canadian government’s genocidal program of taking Indigenous children from their families and putting them in residential schools, his choice to write about a “kind” school horrifies me and I can’t recommend this book anymore.]
Silver in the Wood (m/m, both cis and gay, fantasy, novella) by Emily Tesh. This is so dreamy and atmospheric. A good gay and fae time. Content warnings: murder, violence.
In things that are neither Romance nor romance, I also read Tochi Onyebuchi’s dystopian (but really just the actual present!) sci-fi novella Riot Baby, which is painful and powerful. It’s about racism and police brutality and the carceral state—and it’s about a brother and sister and their relationship and what it means to love in each other in this very violent world. Content warnings: other than what’s mentioned above, there’s also parental death, attempted suicide, pregnancy/pregnancy loss, and medical abuse.
And on the internet:
Stone Fruit Season, an absolutely gorgeous comic by Shing Yin Khor, about peaches and Americana and surviving depression
An excellent Texas Monthly piece on Vivian Stephens, the Black editor who founded Romance Writers of America, who never received full credit for the work she did
Anne Helen Petersen: “I’m a bad gardener, and bad gardening is my hobby.”
I start teaching (remotely) tomorrow, so if next week’s newsletter has no books in it, that’s why. See you then!
