An Ounce of Knowledge
On the evening of December 15, 2023, my sister introduced me to the NYT connections game, where you are given sixteen words and have to sort them into groups of four, guessing what four words go together and why. On that night's set of words, there were a lot of big cats, and one of them was "snow leopard". I figured one of the categories was probably "big cats", but then I hesitated, because I couldn't remember if snow leopards were technically classified as big cats or not, and maybe the game was trying to trick me with a seemingly super easy category (as it sometimes does). I figured that instead of just guessing and potentially striking out if the game WAS trying to trick me, I'd just quickly look up snow leopards to double check if they were classified as big cats or not.
This was how the wikipedia article started (it has since been changed):
and both my sister and I were like okay hang on we have to investigate this now what the hell is ounce
Turns out the (most likely) etymological lore of ounce is that a long time ago the greeks referred to most medium-ish cat species as "lynx", which was later latinized to "lonza", which became "lonce" in french, but because french words sometimes start with Ls if they're in front of words that begin with a vowel, the word "lonce" was misinterpreted as "l'once", and therefore considered "once" in singular form, and then at some mysterious point it somehow gained a u, started referring to only snow leopards and not lynxes, and finally...we had the humble ounce. This effectively derailed the rest of our evening because of how delighted we were to find this out.
I cannot begin to explain how much joy it brings me to know this bit of trivia and how much I love ounce. Snow leopards are in fact my favourite big cat and this just makes me love them more. I almost exclusively refer to them as ounces now. Let's all bring back ounce!!!!
