STRANGE BUT TRUE

Q: Shanghai (China), Barbados (Caribbean), Soloi (Athenian colony, Cilicia), Buncombe County (North Carolina): All are colorful, distinctive places lending their names to verbs. Can you name and define any of them?

A: The verb “shanghai” suggests the meaning, to kidnap men to work on ships, says Anu Garg on his A. Word. A. Day website. Since China was often the destination for these ships, Shanghai came to mean “to recruit forcibly.” In a similar vein, Barbados, formerly a British colony, became the verb “barbados,” “to forcibly ship someone to another place to work.” “Between 1640 and 1660, thousands of Irish people were sent by the British as indentured servants to work in Barbados and elsewhere in the Caribbean.”

Soloi gives us “solecize,” named after the ancient Athenian colony in Cilicia whose dialect the Athenians considered substandard, hence its meaning “to make an error in language, etiquette, etc.” There’s always room for improvement when billboards announce “Open fo Beakfart” or “Affable Rates with a Mirco Fridge.”

Finally, consider the story behind Buncombe’s association with the noun “bunk” and the verb “to debunk.” In 1820, U.S. Rep. Felix Walker of Buncombe County made a pointless speech in the U.S. Congress, and though his colleagues urged him to stop, he persisted, claiming that the speech was “for Buncombe.” Eventually, “Buncombe” became “bunkum” became “bunk,” a synonym for “meaningless speech.” Hence, “to debunk” is “to expose the falseness of a claim, myth, belief, etc.”

Q: A “hot zone” in the dreaming brain shines a cool light on its hidden meaning. Explain, please.

A: Neuroscientist Benjamin Baird and consciousness expert Giulio Tononi and their team used scalp electrodes to record sleepers’ brain waves via high-density electroencephalography, says Tanya Lewis in Scientific American magazine. They woke people at frequent intervals to ask if they’d been dreaming and what about, garnering about 1,000 waking accounts. “The team identified a ‘hot zone’ ... near the back of the head, where low-frequency brain waves (linked to unconsciousness) decreased and high-frequency activity rose when people said they had been dreaming” (Nature Neuroscience). In another experiment, “the scientists predicted with 87 percent accuracy whether the participants were dreaming, and brain-wave activity in certain brain regions was linked to specific dream content, including locations, faces and speech.” A potential next direction? Actually trying to predict dream content.

Q: Let’s hear it for the unexpected “marriage” of the eyes and the ears. Can you explain?

A: For the first time, researchers have discovered that “our eardrums appear to coordinate with our eyes to shift our hearing to the direction we are looking,” perhaps helping determine which objects are making the sounds we hear, says Aylin Woodward in New Scientist magazine. When Duke University’s Jennifer Groh and her team inserted microphones into the ears of 16 people to study how their eardrums changed when their visual focus shifted, they detected changes in ear canal pressure probably caused by middle ear muscles tugging on the eardrum.

For example, when we look left, the drum in our left ear gets pulled farther into the ear and that of our right ear gets pushed out, before swinging back and forth a bit. Says Groh, “We think that before actual eye movement occurs, the brain sends a signal to the ear to say ‘I have commanded the eyes to move 12 degrees to the right.’”

Currently, hearing aids amplify all sound equally. But further study might lead to better devices able to match the brain of someone with normal hearing who can focus on one person talking while it ignores other nearby conversations.