origin of ‘paraphernalia’
from Medieval Latin ‘paraphernalia’, short for ‘paraphernalia bona’, ‘married woman’s property’, i.e. the goods which a bride brings over and above her dowry
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an oxymoronic word: ‘oxymoron’
The word ‘oxymoron’ has the property it denotes: it is from Greek ‘oxús’, meaning ‘sharp’, ‘acute’, and ‘mōrόs’, meaning ‘dull’, ‘stupid’.
Read MoreEating in the Romance languages
In Latin, short words having complicated irregularities in their forms gave way to simpler words with regular patterns and longer phonetic individualities.
Read Morea Northern-English word: ‘mardy’
‘mardy’: ‘sulky’, ‘moody’—from ‘mard’, dialectal alteration of ‘marred’, meaning, of a child, ‘spoilt’, and the suffix ‘-y’, meaning ‘having the qualities of’
Read MoreWhy does ‘season’ mean both ‘a division of the year’ and ‘to flavour’?
‘to season’, from Old French ‘saisonner’: ‘to do something during the proper season’, hence ‘to make appropriate to the circumstances’, ‘to flavour (a dish)’
Read Morea Shakespearean phrase: ‘this mortal coil’
the troubles and activities of the world—literary or humorous, from Hamlet’s speech “to be or not be”—‘coil’: probably from Middle French ‘acueil’, encounter
Read Morethe making of ‘omelette’
1611—from French ‘omelette’, ultimately an alteration of ‘lemelle’, ‘knife blade’ (from Latin ‘lamella’), with reference to the flattened shape of the dish
Read Moreorigin of ‘eavesdrop’
‘To eavesdrop’ originally referred to standing within the eavesdrop (the ground on to which water drips from the eaves of a house) in order to overhear what is going on inside.
Read MoreThe verb ‘unfriend’ was coined in the 17th century.
The verb unfriend was coined by the Church of England clergyman Thomas Fuller (1608-61) in The Appeal of Injured Innocence (1659).
Read Moremeaning and origin of ‘the dog’s letter’
Named after Latin ‘canina litera’ (‘the canine letter’), ‘the dog’s letter’ is a name for the letter R, from its resemblance in sound to the snarl of a dog.
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