SWI < universe >

As part of our March artist study of Lita Albuquerque, we did an SWI investigation of < universe >.

read The Boy Whose Head Was Filled with Stars: A Life of Edwin Hubble by Isabelle Marinov

look at images of outer space (Hubble Space Telescope calendar)



go outside and do a cosmic address meditation as described here

if you were going to make a piece of art that represented how small humans are in relationship to the cosmos, what would you do?

SWI < universe >

In SWI (Structured Word Inquiry), < uni > is considered not a prefix but a base, the evidence for this being the word < unique >. It is not possible for a word to consist of solely a prefix and a suffix. Every word either is a base or has a base.

If we then suppose < uni > to be a base, we see that < universe > is a compound word.

The children and I brainstormed words that had the word parts < uni > and < verse> in them. They knew that < uni > carries a sense of "one," as in unique, unicycle, unicorn, and unilateral.

They were less sure about < verse >, so I looked up and read to them the etymology of the words on their list.

(Zac thought of converse and conversation after this photo was taken.)

Here are the links to those entries in the Online Etymology Dictionary:

reverse

obverse

averse

adverse

adversary

converse

conversation

We discovered that < verse > comes from a Latin word which meant turn.

Thus we find that < universe > means "turning as one," which I think is so lovely!

Dictionary of Word Origins
by Joseph Shipley (1945)

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