Last Word of the Week, I wrote about the first half of the new words I learned in 2022, a salmagundi (random assortment) of rare terms I had come across. Since then, I haven’t encountered any new ones, but I did learn two new etymological facts on the wintry theme of the recent holiday.

First, the terms “arctic” and “antarctic” come from the Greek word for bear, “arktos,” and many online sources say this is because polar bears reside at the North Pole, but not the South, so the words mean “has bears” and “doesn’t have bears.” This is a false folk etymology, as credible sources can relate. The names probably come from before any Western scientific explorers had spent time in either icy biome. The tipoff is this: The prefix “ant-” does not mean “no” — rather, it means “opposite.” In reality, the term refers to the skies, not to megafauna: At the North Pole, the constellations Ursa Minor and Ursa Major are visible. Ursa Minor (Latin for “little bear”) contains the North Star, and Ursa Major contains the Big Dipper, so even someone with little celestial navigational knowledge can locate it pretty quickly. (In the Southern Hemisphere, the easy-to-spot thing in the night sky is the Southern Cross, so we might have instead called the South Pole the Stauric and the north the Antistauric, after the Greek word “stauros” for stake or cross.)