Story Questions

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I: Writing Dangerously
April 12th, 2018

"Where does the word 'dad' come from?"
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The first question was posed. Where did it come from? Why was it here? Was it a mass conspiracy? It can't be latin, pater. But like it's everywhere. パパ, Vati, papa, papi, 爸爸. One or two syllables, a hard voiced consonant connected with soft vowels. Even that original latin starts with "pa". This question must be rectified with a sensible answer, before the world crumbles looking for an answer.

Several wise men and women have stated that the best way to learn is by writing things down, and I took this advice for the first time in my life in April 2018. A journal found in a desk drawer under the tri-caster* offered me the oppurtunity. I had nothing important to learn from school, unfortunately. A mix of devouring textbooks and documentaries as a child and bad teachers left my high school education lacking. So I took the learning upon myself, filling the journal with questions to be answered at a later date. I started with five questions evenly spaced on the first page. As of writing this, there are roughly thirty pages filled to the margins with questions, many answered, a few left forever unanswerable. But I started with the question that scared me the most. "Where does the word 'dad' come from?" Surely I knew something about it, but it was a complete blank. My mind raced with conspiracies, cover-ups, and ancient secrets that this simple turn of phrase may hold.

I took to the streets, journal in hand, press pass in the other. Camera ready to catch a glimpse of what I was never meant to see. A lone wolf, in a world of sins and lies, ready to squeeze the truth out of everything. In this midwestern urban town, there was a dark underbelly waiting to be exposed, a criminal empire under my very nose. I knew that that president Hoover had secrets he didn't want to get out. Why else would he share the name of a vacuum cleaner?

Wait a second! Hoover-that's a vacuum cleaner. The Cleaners is where you go to get laundry done. Laundry, like laundering money. Laundering money is a crime. Criminals are persued by cops. Cops used to have badges made from copper. The atomic symbol for copper is Cu. Cu are the first letters of cubs. Cubs play in the Wrigley Stadium. Wrigley makes gum, which gets caught in carpets. What do you clean carpets with? Vacuum cleaners. Who uses vacuum cleaners? Dads. I knew where I had to start.

"where did the word dad come from"

The google results were promising, at first. Most of it was anecdotal, unusable in court. But then I found a secret way in. I went down to the dark alleys I vowed never to return to. To my informant, wiktionary.

Let me set the scene. A dark night. Rain poors down on a dark alley, lit only by a burning cigarette. There he is, in the shadows, my informant.

"I need information, wik-"

"I thought I told you never to use my name. What do you need? I thought you gave up the private eye business!" His voice is snivelling, high-pitched, like a little boy. The coward.

"I need to know where it comes from. It's out on the streets, you must of heard of it. It's called 'dad'."

I took down the notes I found in my journal, hastily written and coated with rain.

"Dad" is a sound found in many languages, so it's reasonable to beleive it comes from babytalk. It's present in Middle English, as dadd or dadde, possible from Old English aetta, from Germanic atto. Here it comes from Frisian, or perhaps an earlier proto-language, variations on ate and taate. The Celts has tad, and the Russians' uncle is дядя (dyadya), so it must have very early ancestry in European languages. To further the confusion, the modern definitions vary, from a literal father to an attractive and paternal man. Use as a word for a male lover most likely comes from Latin America, with papi.

He spilled his guts, and I had the information I needed. Another case solved, but countless more to solve, including the fifth, the most daunting of all.

*a piece of equipment used for video production during my job as video engineer in my high school theater