the curious case of the French word ‘oignon’
Decided by the Académie française, the erroneous spelling ‘oignon’ (= ‘onion’) has become a symbol of prejudiced people, ignorant of the history of their own language.
Read More“ad fontes!”
Decided by the Académie française, the erroneous spelling ‘oignon’ (= ‘onion’) has become a symbol of prejudiced people, ignorant of the history of their own language.
Read Morea means of enforcing conformity—Greek mythology: Procrustes was a robber who made his victims fit a bed by either stretching them longer or cutting them shorter
Read Morecurrent use seems to allude to a speech by Winston Churchill in May 1940—but the metaphor goes back to the early 17th century
Read Morefrom an advertisement for the concentrated beef extract Bovril, showing a bullock lamenting over a jar of the product
Read Moreconfused activity and uproar—alludes to the frequent collocation of ‘alarum’ and ‘excursion’ in stage directions in Shakespearean drama
Read MoreWhy is the element one in words such as alone and only not pronounced like the numeral one? Both the indefinite article an (a before consonant) and the numeral one are from Old English ān—which has survived in Scotland as ane, used both as indefinite article and as numeral. This Old-English word ān meant a/an, one, […]
Read More‘robe’ originally denoted something that has been robbed—French ‘voler’ (‘to fly’) has come to mean ‘to steal’ via falconry
Read Morefrom Phormio, by the Roman dramatist Terence—appeared in English in the 1539 translation of Erasmus’s adages
Read MoreUK, 1848—people of various professions; people of all kinds—alludes to ‘Rub a dub dub’, a nursery rhyme of the late 18th century
Read MoreUK, 1869—inaccurate translation of Latin ‘panem and circenses’ (literally ‘bread and circus games’) as used by the Roman poet Juvenal
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