Tag archives: word origins
Riotous words
Various English cities spent a good portion of last week dealing with rioting, avoiding the riots, commenting on said riots, and cleaning up the aftermath. Leaving aside the ongoing discussion regarding the causes and effects of these civil disturbances, it would be interesting to look at the word riot itself. Riot has been in use [...]
Wall of words: the Berlin Wall fifty years on
The Berlin Wall was built fifty years ago on 13 August 1961. Like the concrete wall, the word wall divides Europe linguistically. Some European languages, like German and French, form their words for wall from the Latin murus. So the German for Berlin Wall is die Berliner Mauer. English, Irish, and other languages use another [...]
Eating your words
“Keep your words sweet – you may have to eat them” is an aphorism often attributed to the French Quaker missionary Stephen Grellet, although variants of this phrase turn up in a number of other places. Grellet was perhaps a man who was aware of the etymological background of some English words for food, for [...]
Why a catastrophe hasn’t always been bad news
The non-stop coverage this past month (at least in the United States) of the negotiations on raising the debt limit has propelled a number of words into prominence. Words and phrases such as ceiling, default, and credit rating have all received prime real estate in many newspapers. Along with these words, used largely in an [...]
What could be nicer than nice?
Picture the scene. I’m cooking lunch and put on some music to accompany the chopping when in comes Masie, who’s over from Washington. She picks up the CD case and looks at it with the sophistication that only a nine-year-old can manage. ‘Miss Harrison says you shouldn’t say that word.’ ‘Which word’s that?’ I say, [...]
Indebted to…Italy
Try this experiment: think of a word, any word, that we use regularly in English which has clear Italian origins before reading on. Ready? It’s more than likely you’ve come up with a gastronomic term – a snap poll I took last week placed pizza, spaghetti, and cappuccino as front runners (along with ciao, which [...]
‘Hackergate’: the language of scandal
As the phone-hacking scandal continues to loom large in much of the world’s media, so we hear more and more instances of associated vocabulary – fit and proper, hacking, blagging. Not all of these terms are new – after all hacking has been around for quite some time – but they demonstrate how often scandals [...]
All in a day’s work: the days of the week
The Latin days of the week in imperial Rome were named after the planets, which in turn were named after gods. These names were adopted in translated form by the English and other Germanic peoples. In most cases the Germanic names have substituted the Roman god’s name with that of a comparable one from the [...]
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