Nothing like the thought that interrupts you from a deeper thought and makes you pause with a “but how did I not see this before” feeling.

I’m assuming it’s because of a stray Pinky and the Brain reference last week. We were coming up with team names for a charitable 90s trivia night, and that put Animaniacs on my brain. Which, maybe catcalling my wife with “hellllooooo nurse” had something to do with it, too, but either way, antics, even if it’s not in the show name, was somehow on my mind and my memory is tying them together.

So when I stumble across semantics writing a note the question that gave me said aforementioned feeling was: are antics and semantics somehow related? What’s their etymology?

I will literally stop everything I am doing for a thought like this. And, I did.

It’s important to theorize first. You want to be as wrong as possible, if possible, to stay humble in life. Which is another way to say, in the rare instances where you nail something, you really get to celebrate it and feel brilliant for 30-90 seconds.

Maybe semantics is the story of organizing towards order, from something otherwise silly. Or the structure of chaos! How to discern meaning from otherwise mayhem in some cogent way.

These all sounded plausible to me. Which, again, is important in case you’re right, and laughable in hindsight.

In this case, they are laughable. Let me interrupt this post with a picture of our team at trivia night. Did we lose? Well, does charity ever really lose? (Yes, we lost, but we did finish solidly mid-table, and our friends won some steaks in the meat raffle, which is an A+ type of raffle, for the record)

So as it turns out, semantics comes from the Greek semantikos, which means significant, or “to signify” in verb form, semainein. It evolves into the French semantique in the 1880s and then the English did their thing from there.

Antics, on the other hand, comes from the Latin antiquus, meaning ancient. The Italians turned it into antico, and in the 1500s the English borrowed it as antic to describe the grotesque figures found in Roman ruins. Only from there did it drift into a word for weird clowns and, later, odd behaviors, as we use it today.*

They both do have rich etymological history. They just have absolutely nothing to do with each other.

But, and hear me out, isn’t the signifying of silliness being turned into story kinda great?

I swung and missed, but still learned something. Maybe you can’t take it to trivia night, but - these are my antics and this is how I roll.

Ahem, how we roll.

*Bonus sidenote on grotesque: it comes from the Italian grotta, meaning “cave.” These caves had wall art of the day on them, and the art was weird looking to the excavating explorers. So that’s how cave and gross got merged. I never knew they were related, either, but I will only and always think of this when we visit a Grotto Pizza location. “Grotesque!” Luckily, this event was at Sabatini’s, which I can only assume means pickle and pepperoni pizza of the gods.