“Ow?”

I have a dear doctor pal who has this intriguing habit of looking up not just the meaning of words, but their origins. It’s both annoying and educational. Plus side? You get smarter, if only in a Chamber of Commerce Mixer/Useless Information sort of way. But the guy will follow you into men’s room stalls, breathlessly spouting definitions and where words first reared their ugly heads.

“Hey! Check this out!” says my friend, blocking my access to the toilet paper. “‘Divorcee?’ Traced back to the year, 1400. From the French, ‘to put away or abandon.’ Taken from the word, ‘divorcer.’ Hey! You’re not going to believe this John, but the Oxford Dictionary of Etymology has your photo next to the word!” He laughs. Resoundingly. I ask if he could get to the part of his stand-up where he points out he has T-shirts and CD’s for sale on the table in the back and close the door on his way out.

I looked up the word, “ow,” the other day. It can be traced to just about every Indo-European language except English. It seems to derive from the Old French, an interjection used to denote a wide variety of emotions, from pain to fear to surprise. I’ve found myself using the term more and more lately, like sitting, standing, walking, resting, bumping into an old in-law.

One of baseball’s greatest players, Mickey Mantle, once quipped: “Had I known I was going to live this long I would’ve taken better care of myself.” The nerve of the guy, the New York Yankee slugger was just a punk kid when he said it.

Despite what those lying life insurance........

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