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Tuesday, March 1, 2016

Remembering Our Roots

I don't know about you all, but sometimes while I am sitting in class I think about everything other than what I'm supposed to be currently thinking about...

Today, I happened to be wondering about the words "residence" and "life" and where they came from. After all, we are Residence Life. We pride ourselves on our identity as a community and as staffs, and part of that pride comes from the knowledge we have about the staffs that came before us. It seems only natural to delve a little bit deeper!

As it turns out, we go pretty far back (I'm talking like 14th century far back)! Check it out!


Residence has also been burrowed into German as Residenz and Dutch as residentie,



But what happens if we put those two words together? Well... it turns out residence life is pretty new. Here's an Ngram provided by Google of the occurrences of residence, life, and residence life in printed English over the past 500 years:

It's no surprise that life and residence get a fair amount of air-time throughout recent history, but even more surprising is that residence life didn't even appear in written English until approximately 1899.

The future is in our hands! Stay strong, ResLifers! 



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