Greek Words

You really have to give the Greeks credit. Today we use all sorts of greek roots to create massive words. Hydrophobic, Anthropomorphic, Pseudopod. The Greeks didn't have any use for those words. The massive psychologist glut we have now is quite recent. We give much credit to Greek theater, but how many furry pieces did they produce? And the Greek microbiologist probably looked like those guys in that Far Side cartoon squinting at glass dishes. Yet they still bothered to give us these words. Talk about initiative! if we tried that today we'd have the marketing group complaining at how it's hard to form a PR campaign for such long words. Focus groups would find that the immature demographic overwhelming wants more lewd phrases. Tech support would point out that the number of letters would increase the number of spelling errors they'd have to deal with. If you don't believe me, just look at the words coined nowadays: "artsy" "mcjob" "zine" Not only did the Greeks create these long lasting words, but they developed better storage methods. To keep the words in good shape over time, the Greeks made them easy to disassemble. No need to store your Hydrophobia all in one spot, the hydro neatly pops off leaving you with two nice and small words. And if that wasn't impressive enough, they standardized the interfaces and made them modular. You can pop the hydro off of hydrophobia and it will snap onto a philia with no reconfiguration. I shudder to think how this would come out today. You'd have the American standard and the European standard for word junctions which couldn't join to each other. People would have to carry around extra letters to try to convert the interfaces. Then some group would come up with a new universal standard, but only half the word-users would upgrade requiring another set of interface converters.

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