origin of ‘slave’ and ‘Slav’, of ‘robot’ and of ‘ciao’
The word ‘slave’ is from Medieval Latin ‘Sclavus’, ‘Slav’, because the Slavic peoples were frequently reduced to a servile condition by the Germanic conquest.
Read MoreTag: Romance languages
origin of the word ‘immolate’
The verb ‘immolate’ is from Latin ‘immolare’, meaning, literally, ‘to sprinkle (a victim) with sacrificial meal’, from ‘mola salsa’, ‘salted spelt-meal’.
Read Moremeaning and origin of the phrase ‘pigs might fly’
The original form of this phrase was ‘pigs fly with their tails forward’. Also: the French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish equivalent expressions.
Read MoreHow Horace Walpole coined ‘serendipity’.
The noun serendipity denotes the faculty of making by accident discoveries that are both fortunate and unexpected. (It has been borrowed into Spanish as serendipia, into Italian as serendipità, and into French as sérendipité.) It was coined by the English writer and politician Horace Walpole (1717-97). In a letter that he wrote to his friend Horace Mann […]
Read Morea linguistic investigation into ‘cheese and ‘fromage’
The word cheese is from Old English cēse, cȳse, of West-Germanic origin; it is related to its Dutch and German equivalents kaas and Käse respectively. Those words are ultimately derived from Latin caseus, cheese, which is also the origin of: – Spanish queso – Portuguese queijo – regional Italian cacio – Romanian: caș. Based on […]
Read Morea linguistic and historical study of ‘foie gras’
The French term foie gras, from foie, liver, and gras, fat, fatty, denotes the liver of a specially fattened goose or duck prepared as food. Short for pâté de foie gras, it also denotes a smooth rich paste made from fatted goose or duck liver. Its first known use in English is in The Fudge […]
Read Moreetymological twins: ‘clock’ – ‘cloak’
cloak: twin roses designs The nouns clock and cloak are doublets, or etymological twins: they are of the same derivation but have different forms and meanings. Despite the notion of ‘two’ implied by doublet, the term is also applied to sets of more than two words. In this case, cloche, a borrowing from French, […]
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word histories 