"Wazzup?" Bubblewrap Bob looked up, startled.
"I'm going to e/merge," Keitu smiled happily. It had taken her a little while to organise, what with badwidth issues and frozen fingers, but she'd finally gotten there.
"Emerge from what?" Bob scratched his head.
Keitu paused. She'd always considered emergence to be an opening up, a state of excited novelty and fulfilled expectation. She'd never really given much thought to what preceeded the emergence. But on reflection the e-would refer to a Latin root, like ex-, meaning from or out of, she suspected.
She reached across for her dictionary. Sure enough, the root was Latin. She read:
- emerge v. (-ging) 1 come up or out into view 2 (of facts etc) become known, be revealed 3 become recognized or prominent 4(of a question, difficulty etc) become apparent
- emergence n. emergent adj. [Latin: related to merge]
Merge, she knew well, meant join. So emerging meant, etymologically, joining out of...? Out of what, she wondered.
Bob took the dictionary and paged. "Merge is from the Latin mergo, meaning dip. So you've got a blending out of, or..." he chuckled mischievously, "a causing to lose character and identity in..." He met Keitu's startled gaze. "Really, it does say so, right here. Though admittedly it's the second definition, so not the most common usage."
Keitu frowned. "That's merge. So emerge would be the state out of that!"
"Causing to lose character and identity out of?" suggested Bob slyly.
Keitu looked confused. "How does any of this relate?" she asked.
Bob whooped. "Looks like we've got an emergency!"
"Well then," Keitu remarked tiredly. "Why don't you also e/merge, and see?"
cross-posted from e/merge2008 blog