This week at work we had a succession of early-morning meetings. By Thursday I was exhausted and I ended up sleeping till 9:00 AM. This has happened to me throughout my life at school and work—I can rise early for some number of days in a row, but it eventually catches up to me.
A new-to-me word explains what I was experiencing: social jetlag. Per the article where I found this term, social jetlag is “the difference between one’s actual, socially mandated wake-up time and one’s natural, biologically optimal wake-up time.” Jetlag, of course, is having one’s sleep routine discombobulated by traveling to a different timezone where the day starts earlier or later than what you’re used to. Social jetlag is that, but the difference is that you’re obliged to discombobulate your sleep for social reasons, like getting to work on time.
People have different circadian rhythms, so different people are most alert and active at different times of the day—the difference between “morning larks and night owls.” According to the article, one third of the population has chronic social jetlag. And this has health consequences, such as decreased cognitive abilities and increased obesity. As someone in the article says, “The practice of going to sleep and waking up at ‘unnatural’ times could be the most prevalent high-risk behaviour in modern society.”
A serious problem. Though it does remind of this excellent quote by Charles Miller that I think many night owls can relate to: “The world is spectacularly, unfairly biased towards morning people. I suspect that is because they got up first and had it all organised that way before anyone else was out of bed.”
It’s possible that the pandemic-era phenomenon of working from home has helped some people with this. If you don’t have to make a long commute to the office, maybe you can get up later and therefore accrue less social jetlag?
As a bonus new-to-me word, the same article also taught me the term zeitgeber, which is an outside cue like sunlight that helps the body synchronize one’s circadian clock to the natural day. I liked this term because it’s German for “time-giver” or “synchronizer.” That term has been around since the 1950s and somehow I’d never encountered it, how sad.
Let us move on to origins. I recently wondered where the word lobby came from. (Perhaps I was standing in one.) The word has had a more interesting journey than I had expected.
As is so often the case, we got the word lobby from Latin. Medieval Latin had the word lobia, which referred to various architectural features of monasteries: a gallery, an arcade, or a covered walkway (cloister). We imported this word directly from Latin, and the first mention of a lobby in 1563 noted about a monastery that “Our Recluses neuer come out of their lobbeis.” Soon thereafter this sense generalized into the meaning we have today, namely a space from which corridors lead, or the waiting area in a building.
A surprise is that Latin seems to have gotten the word from a Germanic dialect. Old High German had the word lauba, which referred to a sheltered place or hut. It’s possible that this goes back to an older sense of an outdoor shelter in particular, and that lauba is the term from which we also got the word leaf.
Another surprise is that English got the word a second time via a different route: the Germanic word also went into Old French as the word loge. (I don’t know how the b of lauba became a g.) From Old French this went into medieval English as logge, which we have today as lodge. You can see how a term that referred to a sheltered place or hut went one route to become a sheltered area in a monastery, and went a different route to become a dwelling.
As an aside, we have some other words we got as Germanic terms and again via a Latin borrowing of that same word. Examples include ward (Germanic) and guard (Latin); warranty (Germanic) and guarantee (Latin); war (Germanic) and guerilla (Latin).
By about 1800, a lobby started to be used in the US to indicate a group of people who hung around in the lobbies of legislative buildings so they could grab lawmakers and try to influence them. This evolved into the word lobbyist for an individual in such a collective, and into the verb to lobby meaning to try to influence the lawmakers. All of these influence-related senses broadened somewhat beyond the purely legislative, so that today you can talk about the anti-leafblower lobby in your homeowners’ association or about kids lobbying their parents to get a pet.
Not a bad journey, eh? From leaf (maybe) to sheltered place to a cloister to a waiting area to an influence group to trying to talk dad into a puppy.
Like this? Read all the Friday words.
about a decade ago, I saw a post on Tumblr that went something like “I’m neither an early bird or a night owl. I’m some kind of permanently exhausted pigeon.”
In college, I laughed. These days I’m considering putting it in my Twitter profile.