Even in the Before Times, an all-too-common question was “Where should we go?” For dinner, for vacation, for a change of scene. Today’s new-to-me word helps provide an answer: randonauting, which I learned from the While You Were Talking podcast.
At its simplest, randonauting is using the Randonautica app to “randomly” generate GPS coordinates for a spot you should go to. The idea is to give you a place to go that you would not normally go and might not even know about, known in randonauting lingo as a Blind-Spot. In this regard, randonauting is a high-tech version of the “stick a pin in the map” approach of generations past.
I put quotation marks around “randomly,” though, because the randomness is tempered. First, you can specify a radius; after all, you don’t want to be in Seattle and have it give you coordinates for a location in Guatemala. But the quotes also address a second aspect of randonauting: the idea that the numbers that the app generates are in part the result of Mind-Matter Interactions. (Not my capitalization, btw.) Or to cite an explanation, that “the human mind actually has a statistically significant impact on the output of quantum random number generators (qRNG)” and that the app “can generate what are called Intention Driven Anomalies (IDA’s) which are coordinate locations that are calculated based on the density of qRNG output and which are often explored through the use of intention.”
So the promise of randonauting is that it has a kind of intentional randomness. (I suppose you might be able to say that sticking a pin in a map might be subject to the same kind of unconscious intentionality.) Some people point to stories that suggest to them that this really works. There’s a story that sooner or later randonauts will encounter a “piss bottle.” In this vein, the most famous incident occurred in Seattle, when some people who were randonauting were led to a beach where they found the remains of a gruesome crime. (Yo, trigger warning!) Whether there are larger forces at work in the selection of randonautical coordinates I will leave for others to decide.
As a language aside, I like the term randonauting and its variants. Unlike smize from a couple of weeks ago, it’s a blend that’s readily understandable from its component pieces. And it was an inspired choice to use naut as the second part. Nautes is a Greek root for “sailor” that’s appeared in all sorts of words: Argonaut (Jason and the), aeronaut, astronaut, cosmonaut. A randonaut is therefore someone who’s sailing the (sea of) randomness, nice.
For origins this week, I have the word clue. (I also got this from a podcast, namely Jill Lepore’s The Last Archive.) We often think of a clue as something the helps a detective solve a crime. And the definition does cover that sense; a clue is “something that guides through an intricate procedure or maze of difficulties.” (M-W) Although it’s not evident, the word’s origins are actually in this definition.
Ok, going back. Clue was originally clew; the -ue spelling was applied in the Middle Ages to some words that ended in -ew(e), for example clew(e) > clue and triewe > true. Here’s where it gets interesting: the word clew meant and today still means a ball of thread or yarn. (I didn’t know this, but I bet that people who know yarncrafts do.) It’s a good old Germanic word, not a borrowing.
We get from clew/clue, the ball of yarn, to the detective’s clue via a little semantic jump. If you remember your Greek mythology, Theseus entered the Labyrinth with a sword and a—yes—ball of string that he unspooled so he could find his way back out after he killed the Minotaur.
By medieval times people were using the word clew/clue (of thread) to refer to finding one’s way through metaphoric mazes. And by the 1700s, “with the literal sense obscured” (OED), the word was being used in our modern sense of a piece of evidence.
This really opens a new dimension for me for the word clue. Given my penchant for British crime dramas, I suspect that every time a character talks about a clue, I’m now going to envision a ball of yarn.
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