The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

Greek Education and Fastchild

If Cynics are dogs, the Stoics were the porch philosophers because their founder Zeno taught in the painted porch or Stoa Poikile of the Great Hall in Athens. If you didn’t like either the Stoics or the Cynics you could go out to a grove that was named after a hero of the Trojan War called Akademos. It was in the grove of Akademeia that Plato taught, and all academies since are named after it, which means that the Police Academy films are all named after a hero of the Trojan War via Plato.

The Athenians, as you can tell, were jolly philosophical chaps. This was largely because they had a wonderful education system in which the Greek children, or paedos, were taken through the whole cycle, or cyclos, of learning. Their knowledge was therefore en-cyclo-paedic.

The Romans were so impressed with the way Greek children were taught all these different subjects that they started writing books called encyclopaedias that were meant to contain articles on every topic there was. Then, two thousand years later, the internet was invented.

The internet works on computers, and computers work on all sorts of different programming languages. These programming languages tend to be rather complicated things that are hard to learn and, even for initiates, slow to use. So in 1994 a chap called Ward Cunningham developed a system of making related webpages that would be very simple and very fast. Because it was so quick, he called it wikiwikiweb, because wiki is Hawaiian for fast and the reduplication wikiwiki therefore means very fast indeed.

Soon, though, people decided that wikiwiki was a bit of a mouthful, and so it was colloquially shortened to wiki. That was the state in which Larry Sanger found the word in 2001, when he had the idea of a collaborative, web-based encyclopaedia that would use the wiki system. He took the words wiki and encyclopedia and mashed them together to form Wikipedia, which is now the seventh most visited website in the world. However, few among its 365 million readers know that Wikipedia means Fastchild. Fewer still will have considered the fact that anyone who likes Wikipedia is technically and etymologically a Wikipedophile.