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When I was in high school I learned about matrices in math.

A mathematical matrix is a table with an equal number of rows and columns of numbers upon which you can perform certain mathematical operations.

That set me up for the working world where I encountered matrix management where I, as an employee, labored under the direction of a manager over along one row, as well as another manager up above me along one column.

So it came as a mild surprise to me as I was writing my book on body words that the part of your fingernail called the matrix was so called because this was a Latin word for “womb” and that’s where your nail grows from, where it’s born.

According to the American Heritage Dictionary the growth all started back in Indo-European with a word root mater that ultimately evolved out of the first “ma ma” sounds a baby makes when cuddling in its mother’s arms.

The American Heritage Dictionary is a well loved and well respected dictionary, but it’s been pointed out to me that American Heritage seems willing to go further out on a limb than some other dictionaries when claiming etymologies on less than rock solid documentary proof. So although this etymology seems to make perfect sense, there are no source documents anywhere that you can point at to prove it.

By the time this “mother” word matrix got to Latin the records indicate that it was specifically being applied to breeding animals.

By the time the Roman Empire was finishing its long engagement the meaning had shifted to “womb,” “source” and “origin.”

It was those Latin scholars in the century leading up to Shakespeare’s day that yanked the word into English.

They first used it in its uterine sense but by the time Shakespeare’s mother had used hers to produce him, the word matrix had also acquired its broader meaning of “source” or “origin.”

The fingernail matrix didn’t show up until about 200 years ago.

All of these meanings the Oxford English Dictionary groups under a general meaning of “a supporting or enclosing structure” which is I suppose where the rows and columns of my management and mathematical matrix come from.

The first citations for matrix management are from 1959 and mathematical matrices are first recorded in 1850.

In between the two I see a citation for matrix applied to physics.

The author credited was no matrix for conversation. His name was Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac and he had a reputation in the world of physics that was in the same league as Albert Einstein. But he was a thinker and not a talker.

Stories abound about what he didn’t say.

He would regularly be introduced to people and long silences would ensue. Unless they asked him a direct question requiring a yes or no answer he generally said nothing at all.

Still, the people who knew his theoretical work in physics felt that he spoke voluminously through his research.

In conversation one word answers were his specialty and the story goes that once, after he’d given a lecture an audience member rose and began

“Professor Dirac, I didn’t understand…bla bla bla…”

Everyone in the hall awaited his august answer.

The clock ticked away.

Silence.

Finally the moderator asked Dirac if he intended to answer the question. Dirac turned to the moderator and completely innocently said

“It wasn’t a question, it was a statement.”