I am your Potter, Luke.

I am your Potter, Luke.

I am your Dada, Luke.

I am a girl here. I am a Neon Fogarty and you can think of me as your friendly guide to the English language.

We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff.

This week we are going to talk about Darth Vader and the names for Dad and about how we use the words better and best.

But first, here is a listener question.

I am listening to your May 9th episode and in talking about hunting dogs, you said, proleth.

I was always taught prowess. So now I am curious. Maybe I am wrong. It's Liz and Stanford, Connecticut.

Thanks Liz, you are not wrong. All the US dictionaries say the pronunciation is prowess with the emphasis on the first syllable.

The Oxford English Dictionary lists the way I pronounce it, prowess with the emphasis on the last syllable as the third British pronunciation option.

So it does seem like the way I have been pronouncing it is, if not out now wrong, quite unusual.

Thanks for the call.

Movie legend has it that the identity of Luke Skywalker's father was hiding in plain sight, well at least through a subtle naming clue.

Darth Vader does, after all, have a distinctly paternal ring to it linguistically.

Indeed, had the big reveal ban I am your father, it would have made a nice play on the heavy breathing villain's name with a nod to an old Dutch term for father.

The true origin story of Vader's moniker isn't as cool as the myth. Apparently George Lucas gave him the name before he decided Vader would be Luke's father.

But as someone who studies the origin of words, I see this story providing an example of something that is real, the universality of the names used for fathers across all languages.

Considering that dads played a key part in populating the dawn of civilization, it's perhaps not surprising that a label for the dude we call dad would emerge early in the development of languages.

But whether it's Papa, Dada or Vader, what is striking is the cross-cultural bias in the words used to describe him, and how the names have stuck around over millennia.

Tracking the linguistic evolution of the modern word father, we find it as far back as written English goes, with references to Fieduer or Faduer or Faduer in Old English texts from the 7th to 11th centuries.

In Old Dutch there was Fador, in Old Icelandic we find Fadir, in Old Hyggehrmann, a precursor to modern German, there was Fadir, now Vatir.

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