This One's for You
This evening in my editing class I was explaining what prepending 'Ur' to a word or phrase meant, since no one else seemed to know. I got it across that it was a way of referring to the first of a kind of thing, or a progenitor, and I then gave a couple of examples: ur-language, ur-hominid, and... there I had to stop, because my mind had supplied and I had almost said "ur-beatle."