Letter W ... DOUBLE U

Did you know that 23 is so strange and that W is linked to strangeness?? 

Transcript

00:01.03
Christina Scovel
Hello, and welcome back to A Pinch of Honesty. I am realizing that maybe my alphabet soup is not going down real smooth, so we'll see how far through the alphabet we get before I get back to maybe some regular, honest podcasts.

00:17.92
Christina Scovel
However, today we're going to cover the letter W. It is symbol of W, right? W. Ha, ha.

00:30.93
Christina Scovel
um It comes from how it was drawn in Latin script. It was introduced between the 7th and 8th century. It used to be two Vs next to each other or two Us until it actually became the W.

00:48.57
Christina Scovel
Let's see. It can be silent, right? So right or wrist. Right. It is one of the only letters, there's a couple of them, but it's one of the only ones that has multiple syllables, which I, it's kind of cool. I had never thought about it before.

01:06.80
Christina Scovel
can be paired with an H, so we can have a buddy, which, it is a unit of power, watts. It's the symbol on the periodic table for tungsten, which always kind of throws me for a loop, like why is it a W?

01:23.33
Christina Scovel
The W key moves you forward in video games. So I think gamers in general kind of like W. W can often stand for win, right? Like I'm going to win something and L for lose.

01:37.24
Christina Scovel
One of the books that's remarkable, it starts with W at the beginning there, is Wethering Heights, which came out 1847. um And if I'm correct, I think it was actually the only book by Bronte.

01:51.72
Christina Scovel
I have yet to actually read it. I do believe I have a ah Penguin classic cloth bound edition of Wethering Heights. and I probably should read it at some point. War and Peace is also a W book that is quite famous, although quite long as well.

02:09.05
Christina Scovel
French, Italian, and Spanish barely use the W. Who knew? Some strange words that begin with W. Woosh-t-a-sire. i love Chex Mix.

02:20.20
Christina Scovel
Chex Mix requires woosh-t-a-sire sauce. If you haven't tried it, hit me up. I'll send you a recipe. It's delish. Woosh-t-a-sire. Bizarre word. Wraith.

02:32.34
Christina Scovel
Right? It's silent at the start. Will the Beast. Will the Beast. And now let's talk about some weird, archaic old war terms. So I feel like W is like the gateway to those types of terms. So the first one is, I'm going to work on the pronunciation here.

02:54.82
Christina Scovel
Wider shins, which means counterclockwise. don't know why you wouldn't just say counterclockwise, but that's the term.

03:03.56
Christina Scovel
Will ohm, which was used for once upon a time in the past. Whamble, which is like a rolling motion or nauseous like you're on the sea to whamble.

03:20.04
Christina Scovel
Welkin, which is heaven. So welkin, these are all terms I've never heard of before.

03:31.06
Christina Scovel
I ran down a rabbit hole with the letter W because it is the 23rd letter in the alphabet. And I was very unaware of the number 23 and the craziness kind of surrounding, sorry, the the number 23 and the craziness surrounding this number.

03:50.86
Christina Scovel
So there's this thing called the 23 enigma, which is the belief that the twenty three number 23 appears unusually often There's also been a film about this. So it is like a ah cult type following belief that the number 23 shows up way too often.

04:10.04
Christina Scovel
Shakespeare was born and died on April 23rd. um Julius Caesar was stabbed 23 times. The human body has 23 pairs of chromosomes and the earth's axis of tilt is at 23.5 degrees.

04:26.61
Christina Scovel
degrees And of course, if you toss in that W stands for win and that Jordan, Michael Jordan, happened to pick the number 23 as his a number for his jersey, you might see that completely come forward full circle.

04:42.86
Christina Scovel
So that W, W, is kind of a wily wabbit out there. It's got some pretty peculiar behaviors, um standing for tungsten, being associated with the number 23, and having little bit of a cult following.

05:03.60
Christina Scovel
i'm going to say i think W may now actually be my favorite letter in the alphabet. What's yours? Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you on the flip side.