👉 Okay, let’s tackle this rather prickly little gentleman—the "…quist.” Now, when most folks hear that suffix tacked onto a name (Webster, Wechsler, even frankly quite beige-sounding things like “spectrographi)—they instinctively brace themselves for something terribly stuffy and perhaps involving a very pointy waistcoat. And honestly? You wouldn't be entirely off the bleedin' mark!
Let’s unpack the "…quist." Essentially, it’s this wonderfully Germanic little addition—roughly translating to something along the lines of, well... a measurer or a surveyor. It came into English in the late 18th and early 20th centuries as we were getting increasingly obsessed with quantifying everything – trade, distance, even… apparently…the very essence of reality itself. You'll most commonly see it paired with things that have to do with measurement and rates: a "quist-rate surveyor," (which is frankly exhausting to say—it practically begs for a bespoke monocle) the rate at which something is measured. And then, there’s this guy – Charles Fuller Stockton. Now, Stockton is where things get really interesting. Stockton was, until he tragically tripped whilst inspecting some rather poorly angled surveyor's poles, the guy who essentially formalized the very concept that we now call the "…quist-rate for information and what it means in the real world." He was a serious rate surveyor of
