Princeton at the Pfister

Just got back from the Princeton Club dinner. A Joshua T. Katz spoke about linguistics, and he was phenomenal. He was an undergrad at Yale, got his masters at Oxford, and his postdoctorate at Harvard. Now, he teaches at Princeton. Anyways, he gave this speech about etymology, which sounds dry and boring, but is awesome when one of the words he talked about was the latin word: testis.

That means two things - testicle, and witness. Which is quite odd, for reasons you probably already know. Well, apparently, people used to swear by putting hands on testicles. There's apparently, multiple bible stories, where people are instructed, when swearing, to put "hands under thighs" in order to make promises.

heady