Sunday Rest: quark. Word Not To Use Today.

 This is a good solid word, and very useful.

It can be tricky, though.

I mean, when you hear the quark what do you think of first? James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, quantum physics...or cheese?

Cheese, eh? 

Hmm...I'm afraid that quark is a word to make us wonder if we really are a protean geniuses, after all.

Sunday Rest: quark. This word describes a soft, white, and rather tasteless kind of German low-fat cheese.

It's also a word made up by James Joyce in his book Finnegan's Wake (a book impenetrable to the extent that Joyce himself boasted that its meaning wouldn't be fully understood for two hundred years). 

The physicist Murray Gell-Mann borrowed Joyce's word to mean one of six hypothetical particles which form a small part of an atom. Gell-Mann was actually already calling them kworks in his head, but when he came across the word quark in Finnegan's Wake he decided to take that spelling. The Finnegan's Wake quote goes:

Three quarks for Mister Mark!

Sure he hasn't got much of a bark

And sure any he has it's all beside the mark.

Gell-Mann pronunciation of the word remained kwork, but nowadays most people say kwark.