Doc McHugh, Kookie and I are sitting in Nori’s cafe, with Doc talking about his time in Colorado. Suddenly, he stops talking and stares off into into the distance.

“What’s up?” I say.

“Colorado,” he says.

“What about it?” I say.

“I think that’s a Spanish word.”

“Sure sounds like it,” says Kookie.

“Does it mean something about ‘red’?” he says. “There’s a lot of red soil and red rocks there.”

“But isn’t the Spanish word for red, ‘rojo’?” I say.

Doc shrugs.

“They could have more than one word for red,” says the Kook.

“They could,” I say, “but I don’t know any.”

“Just because you don’t know it, doesn’t mean they don’t,” says Doc.

“True,” I say. “But I never heard ‘rado’ for red.”

“Might even be a Native word,” says Doc.

“So look it up,” I say, pointing at his phone, lying on the table in front of him.

“Naw,” he says.

“Naw?” I say. “You’re not going to look it up?”

He shakes his head like a petulant child.

“You’re kidding me, right?” I say.

“I’m not,” he says, even more petulant.

“Oh for pete’s sake,” she says, taking out her phone and tapping away.

“Well?” says Doc.

“It says it means ‘The color red,'” she says.

“What website?” I ask.

“Etymologyonline,” she says.

“Ah-ha!” says Doc, “I was right.”

He’s no longer a petulant child — just a gloating one.

“Indeed you were,” I say. “Why don’t you stand up and take a bow?”

Much to my surprise, he doesn’t. But he does have a smug grin plastered across his mug.

This interchange was a perfect example of three things.

One is when three word mavens get together, inevitably some issue of grammar, usage, spelling, diction, etymology or any other language thing will come to the fore.

Another is if you have a cell phone, you can look up anything.

And the third is just because you’ve looked up a question on the internet and found an answer, doesn’t mean it’s correct. In this case, it was, because etymologyonline is a reputable site. You might not get an in-depth history of a word, but what you do get will be true. This stands in stark contrast to a whole lot of other sites, which are half-baked at best and burned-out at worst.

The number of online sites that claim to be authoritative but run the gamut from honestly mistaken to outright lying is astounding. Sadly, that seems to make no difference because a lot of people looking up things aren’t looking for the truth, but to have their beliefs confirmed. And given how many sites there are, the painful reality is the most idiotic of our species can find a cyber-idiot to confirm their mistaken notions. And once they find a fellow idiot, their mistaken notions become The Unvarnished Truth.

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The odds vs. the oddest

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Although gambling is the one vice I’ve never indulged in, I live by the gamblers’ protocol; that is, I always go with the odds. So if I have a question, the first place I look for an answer is an expert.

F’rinstance, let’s say I want to find out something about climate change. I’ve got two local places to look for answers. One is my Landsman Richard Brandt, who not only has advanced degrees in climatology but who also spent ten winters in Antarctica and ten in the Arctic, studying climate change.

My other choice is Bubba Fortier. Though he barely scraped through ninth grade earth science 40 years ago and he thinks People magazine is a scholarly journal, he gladly — and loudly — spends each night expounding on climate change, politics, religion, and Everydamnedthing from his bully pulpit in various area gin mills and roadhouses.

Suffice it to say, I’ll seek out Richard, and avoid Bubba like a 50-foot pothole.

But that’s just me, because lots of people will not only listen to a blowhard like Bubba, but will believe him as well, since they both think alike — as much as they think at all. Recently, I found myself in the middle of just such a shtuss.

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When “in” is not “in”

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A well-meaning friend sent me a video of a some guy “explaining” the origin of the word Indigenous. According to him, the word was a racist term which meant something like “not native to that land,” and he gave what he claimed was its etymology.

I listened to as much of his blather as I could stand and then emailed my pal, telling her the guy was fulla ka-ka. She emailed back and asked how I knew. I told her because word and phrase origins have been my hobby since I was a teenager, I already knew “indigenous’s” etymology … and that guy didn’t.

Then she asked how I knew that.

Ever the very picture of patience, I explained that the guy in the video said the “in” prefix in indigenous meant “not.” The “digenous” part of the word came from the Latin word for “to beget.” And so he concluded it was a racist term that meant the people we refer to as Natives, are not really natives at all.

He was half right … which meant he was completely wrong.

Here’s the key: While the “in” prefix can indeed mean “not,” it can also mean a lot of other things. The classic example of this confusion is the word “inflammable.” From Latin, it first entered English around 1600 and it means to inflame or to set on fire. Its prefix, “in” doesn’t mean “not,” but means “in,” exactly like the English word. The suffix is the Latin word “flammare,” which means blaze. Put it together and it spells ka-bloom!

If you knew your Latin, the definition was pretty obvious. But if you didn’t? Well, you can bet that over the years, a bunch of yahoos seeing the word Inflammable figured they could to toss their still-lit cigareet in that barrel and walk away unscathed — as opposed to fly away ignited. Thus, 200 years later, the word Flammable was coined, hopefully cutting down on Eejits Flambe.

Now getting back to Indigenous: The “In” prefix, like the one in Inflammable, means In. So the word Indigenous clearly means someone from that land.

Being the crashing bore and the guy who obviously never got out of the classroom, I explained all that to my friend. Also, just after I saw the video I’d checked the word’s etymology in The Barnhardt Dictionary of Etymology, one of the many word origin books in my collection, and one of the most authoritative etymologies around. Of course, I told my pal that.

She then said, “But how do you know they got it right?”

At that point, I realized it was futile to try to explain anything more. She believed the guy in the video, not me. So no matter what I said, there’d be a question of how I knew it or where it came from, till it finally degenerated into: I had my opinion, he and she had theirs, and all of them were equally valid. In other words, So there! It’s a very popular sport these days, about to rival baseball as the National Pastime.

As a quote from an old boss of mine came to mind –You don’t have to eat all of a rotten egg to know it’s rotten — so I decided to bow out graciously. Or at least as graciously as I could.

“I think we might need to get another opinion,” I said.

“Great idea. I’ll check them out.” she said. “Who do you recommend?”

“Well,” I said, “around here, there’s really only one go-to guy.”

“Yeah?” she said. “Who’s that?”

I paused for effect. Then I spoke.

“Bubba Fortier.”