Mysteries of vernacular Odd Jessica Oreck and Rachael Teel
Transcriber: Andrea McDonough
Reviewer: Jessica Ruby
Mysteries of vernacular:
Odd,
different from what is usual or expected.
Though the modern word odd has many meanings,
mathematical or not,
they can all be traced back
to the Indo-European root uzdho,
meaning pointing upwards.
Inspired by the idea
of a vertical-pointed object,
speakers of Old Norse modified this root
into a new word, oddi,
which was used to refer to a triangle,
the simplest pointed object
geometrically speaking.
A triangle with a long point,
like an arrow head
or a piece of land jutting out into the sea,
was recognized to have two paired angles
and a third that stood alone.
And over time, oddi began to refer
to something that wasn’t matched or paired.
In Old Norse, oddi also came to mean
any number indivisible by two.
And odda mathr, the odd man,
was used to describe the unpaired man
whose vote could break a tie.
Though the English never called a triangle odd,
they did borrow the odd number
and the odd man.
And finally, in the 16th century,
the notion of the odd man out
gave rise to our modern meaning peculiar.