A WORD, PLEASE — queen

continuity: Next, Professor Aubrey Vellum, with a word that was born a twin, and only one of the twins got a crown.

the verdict: Shuffle any deck of cards and she turns up four times: the queen of hearts, of spades, of clubs and of diamonds, sitting calmly beside the king. We've known her since we were small enough to lose at Snap. But where did she get that title?

a word, please: Queen. A word, please.

the crack: Go back more than a thousand years, to the Anglo-Saxons feasting in their long wooden halls. Their word was cwēn , said like 'kwane,' and it grew from a far older root, spoken by people we'll never meet, that simply meant 'woman.' That same ancient root grew into the Greek word gynē , which is why a doctor who looks after women's health is called a gynecologist. Now here's the twist. In Old English, that old root had split into two nearly identical words, told apart only by how long you held the vowel. The long one, cwēn , belonged to the leader's chief wife, the first lady of the hall. The short one, cwene , said 'kweh-nuh,' meant an ordinary woman. Over the centuries it slid all the way down into 'quean,' an old insult for a woman with a bad reputation.

the collision: As little tribes joined together into kingdoms, cwēn climbed with them, until it meant one person only: the woman on the throne. People sometimes guess that queen is cousin to the Latin regina, or to the Welsh name Gwen. They're lovely guesses, and both are wrong. Regina belongs with rex, the Latin for king, and Gwen means 'fair.' The real story is better, because queen was never borrowed from anyone. It was English from the start. And look what we've done with her since. She rules the chessboard, the beehive and the deck of cards. Now, when your friend nails a presentation, you might tell her she's a queen. The word spent a thousand years climbing to a single throne, and we've cheerfully started handing it back out to everyone we admire.

the glimmer: It was the same root and the same women, yet one word was crowned and the other was scorned. Words don't decide who deserves respect; people do, and the words simply remember what we decided.

the exit: That's the word. Somebody near you deserves the title today, so go on and hand it over.