By Barbara McAllister
Word of the Day: Queue
Pronounced “cue,” queue can be a verb or a noun, depending on whether you queue up for a show or wait in a long queue at the grocery store checkout. You’ll find it more commonly used in the U.K and countries that use British English than in the United States.
A queue is also a collection of entities maintained in a sequence in computer science or where documents sent to the printer wait to be printed in the order they were received.
It’s a visually descriptive word for a line of things from the Latin “cauda,” for tail. The French made cauda into queue, which gave the English word its strange spelling and pronunciation. The capital letter Q itself has a tail, as do most creatures.
Human embryos inside the uterus start off with a tail that gradually disappears, but leaves the evidence of a tail bone after we’re born. Comprising several bones named caudal vertebrae, the tail bone is called a coccyx, the Greek word for “cuckoo,” because the tail bone resembles the bird’s beak. Scientists are not sure why humans lose their embryonic tail, but it’s possibly because it no longer serves any evolutionary purpose. Tails serve a variety of functions in nature. Animals like cats use their tail for balance. On most animals the tail is an appendage but on cats it’s an extension of the spine. Grazing animals like cows and horses use tails to brush away insects. Fish and other marine animals use tails for locomotion while deer and beavers communicate signals with their tails. Dogs use their tails to indicate emotions. Monkeys and opossums have prehensile tails used for grasping and climbing. Birds’ feathered tails serve as rudders to maneuver in flight and balance while perched. Scorpion tails are defensive weapons that contain venom. The function of a pig’s tail is puzzling as is why it’s called a “curlicue” instead of a “curly queue.”
