What KTB Stands For*

It’s not often that we busy Buddha-killers have time to toot our own horn. One might even say that Buddha-killing and horn-tooting are somewhat incompatible. So when our esteemed co-founder Peter Manseau shared this modest piece of information about the traditional meaning of the three-letter sequence K-T-B on the Twittersphere the other day, we KtBniks, as we call ourselves, thought it was worth sharing:

“K-T-B is a triconsonantal root of a number of Semitic words, typically those having to do with writing.”

In Arabic, the words for book, writer, office, and library are all derived from the letters corresponding to K-T-B, most notably book, Kitaab. In Persian, kitaab refers only to a religious text. Anyway, we at Killing the Buddha are proud to share such a generative triconsonantal root with the many flowerings of the word and The Word in Semitic incarnations. Hurray for KTB!

*No, this is not a mission statement. Peter and Jeff’s founding manifesto can still and always be read, shared, and proclaimed from rooftops here.