No comment.

Dear Word Detective: I’ve been looking all over the internet but can’t seem to find a precise answer to explain the origins of the word “engram.” According to the Church of Scientology, it is a word “discovered” by their founder L. Ron Hubbard. But I could have sworn I’d seen it used in science fiction novels published long before it was ever mentioned in “Dianetics.” I’ve heard it in Doctor Who, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, various classic science fiction novels, and pretty much any geek reference I can think of. Not only that, but in many dictionaries, it’s defined as a word used in psychology. If L. Ron Hubbard did invent the word, I don’t know why psychology would be so quick to adopt it, given Hubbard’s well-known hatred of psychology. I would love it if you could explain the true origins of that word so at long last I’ll know for sure whether it’s truly science, or just science fiction! — Ike.

Oh boy, Scientology. I think I’m gonna need a new email address. But I think I can clear up your questions fairly easily. As far as I can tell, L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, never claimed to have actually invented the word “engram,” although he did eventually use it to mean something a bit different than what it had theretofore meant.

“Engram” originated as a term in neuropsychology meaning, as the Oxford English Dictionary explains, “a memory-trace; a permanent and heritable physical change in the nerve tissue of the brain, posited to account for the existence of memory.” The term was coined in the early 20th century by Richard Semon, a German biologist, who believed that as memories form they leave actual lasting physical traces or changes in the brain, which are then re-activated in recalling the memory. The word “engram” is taken from the Greek “en” (in) plus “gramma” (letter), giving the sense of something “written into” the brain. Much energy was apparently devoted in the following decades to poking around the brain looking for these “engrams,” but today neuroscientists generally agree that memory is a far more complex and diffuse system than simply things being written into the brain.

Evidently Hubbard, in his “Dianetics the Modern Science of Mental Health” (1950), originally used the word “engram” in the standard neuropsychological sense of “memory,” but later refined the concept to define “engram” specifically as a sort of stored moment of psychic pain which must be uncovered and resolved (in a process Scientology calls “auditing”) in order for the person to live a happy life.

Wiki-whacked.

Dear Word Detective: I am curious about how the game of “curling” got its name. I had assumed that the term “curl” comes from the motion of the stone after the throw, curling away from a straight line as it moves down the ice. However, Wikipedia says “curl” is actually the sound made by the rock as it slides on the ice: “The word derives from from the Scots language verb ‘curr’ which describes a low rumble (a cognate of the English language verb ‘purr’).” — Andrea Denison.

Oh boy, Wikipedia strikes again. Don’t get me wrong; I love Wikipedia. Did you know, for instance, that you can look up TV schedules by year on Wikipedia and see listings for shows that you watched as a kid but have completely forgotten? Anybody remember “Circus Boy”? It ran on NBC on Sunday nights in 1956. Great show, kinda like “Lassie,” but with chimpanzees. And it turns out that Circus Boy himself was played by Mickey Dolenz, later of The Monkees.

Onward. “Curling,” for the uninitiated, is a sport that involves sliding a heavy stone across ice so that it ends up in a certain position. It’s been described as “chess on ice,” although “arctic shuffleboard” might be closer. Curling is especially popular in Scotland, where it has been played since the 16th century.

Unfortunately, relying on Wikipedia for anything that really matters is like setting out on a long road trip in a 1956 Ford. You may get there, but it’s far from a sure thing. Wikipedia is especially dicey, in my experience, when it comes to word and phrase origins. The people who create entries seem weirdly fond of announcing a term’s etymology with absolute certainty without giving any supporting evidence whatsoever. The entry for “curling” is a good example, offering no scholarly reference to back up their Scots “curr” origin, an omission so glaring that a subsequent contributor added a “citation needed” note to that spot in the text. I’ll have to remember to check back in a week or two, because I have no idea of where the author got that theory. That is not to say that “curling” cannot possibly owe something to that Scots word, which definitely exists, just that there is another explanation accepted by etymologists.

The name “curling” for the sport is, as you assumed, simply a reference to the curve of the stone’s course across the ice. In modern curling, two team members actually accompany the stone on its trip, furiously brushing the ice ahead of it with brooms to smooth the ice and keep the stone on as straight a course as possible. That the sport originated in Scotland and that the Scots “curr” means “rumble” may have contributed to the popular appeal of the name “curling,” but it’s definitely the same sort of “curl” one does to one’s hair.

Incidentally, the English word “curl” started out as the Middle Dutch “krul,” meaning “twisted.” Somewhere along the line, the “r” and the “u” were switched by a fairly common linguistic process called “metathesis.” In the end, we got “curl,” but the original form lives on in that delight of the doughnut world, the cruller.