“ad fontes!”
‘Glamour’ was originally a Scottish alteration of ‘grammar’: this article explains how it came to denote an attractive or exciting quality that makes certain people or things seem appealing. Classical Greek γραμματική (= grammatikḗ) and classical Latin grammătĭca denoted the methodical study of literature, that is to say, philology in the widest modern sense, including textual […]
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Swiss-French ‘crestin’ (= ‘Christian’): in certain valleys of the Alps, a mentally deficient, deformed person suffering from a congenital thyroid deficiency
Read MoreSince antiquity, European languages have variously named the butterfly, in particular by using sound reduplications expressive of its fluttering.
Read More‘maudlin’: tearfully sentimental – from the Middle-English name ‘Maudelen’, designating Mary Magdalene, a follower of Jesus, customarily represented as weeping
Read MoreThe word ‘slave’ is from Medieval Latin ‘Sclavus’, ‘Slav’, because the Slavic peoples were frequently reduced to a servile condition by the Germanic conquest.
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plate 19: La Trénis, Contredanse source: gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque Nationale de France from the 1931 reprint of the caricatures published under the title of Le Bon Genre (1827 edition), including Observations sur les modes et les usages de Paris; the following comment about La Trénis accompanies this plate: (Année 1805.) Cette danse porte le […]
Read MoreThe French masculine noun sanglier denotes a full-grown wild boar. It literally means a boar living on its own, separated from the herd, since, via Old and Middle French forms such as sengler and senglier, it is from the popular Latin singularis (porcus), solitary (pig) – cf. Middle-French terms such as porc sanglier, and in the Vulgate, the Latin version of the Bible, singularis ferus, the noun ferus meaning wild animal (cf. the […]
Read MoreUnexpectedly, the words fawn, meaning a young deer in its first year, and fetus (or foetus), meaning an unborn or unhatched offspring of a mammal, are doublets: they go back to the same etymological source but differ in form and meaning. While fetus has remained identical to this source, the form fawn is the result of sound changes—cf. also turban – tulip, clock – cloak, […]
Read MoreThe obsolete adjective hail meant free from injury, infirmity or disease. It is from Old Norse heill, meaning whole, hale, sound. This Old Norse word is related to the English adjectives whole and hale, which are doublets, as they are both from Old English hāl. The current spelling of whole, which first appeared in the […]
Read MoreThe noun pastis designates an aniseed-flavoured aperitif, while pastiche, or pasticcio, denotes a work of art that imitates the style of another artist or period and a work of art that mixes styles, materials, etc. Unlikely as it may seem, these words are doublets, or etymological twins: although they differ in form and meaning, they go […]
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