Word Facts

Talent is something one is born either having or not, and though it can make someone very rich, to make a living is a great deal of work. This is a belief universally acknowledged, as the word 'talent' in Old English as "talente" used as a unit for measuring weight, derived from the Latin "talentum" meaning ‘weight, sum of money’. The current meaning is a reference to the Latin Bible's "parable of the talents" (Matt. 25:14–30).

Venezuela comes from the Spanish diminutive meaning 'little Venice'. The Spanish colonizers noticed the way that the Venezuelans built their houses upon stilts over water, and likened that to the notable city, with the Italian name, Venezia.

Spelling in English may seem arbitrary and nonsensical, but it is common to find that words with similar spellings, even without similar meanings today, may be closely related. The preposition 'against' was formed in Middle English from the adverb 'again' and the suffix '-s' which is the genitive ending that still appears in "-'s" such as "Robert's dog" to show possession, and from there, the '-t' was added to mimic superlatives. This same process occurred in the evolution of among and amongst. The steps may be fairly straightforward, but the connection between 'again' and 'against' is not very clear necessarily. 'Again' actually changed meaning over time from the original Old English, 'ongēan, ongægn' which meant something similar to ‘opposite’.

People have probably heard that biology is "the study of life". Although this is close to the truth, it misses the mark. 'Bio' comes from the Greek word, 'bios' means "human life" or "course of (human) life’. Until recently, a biologist would have only have been thought or expected to study humans, though now the sense has been extended to ‘organic life’. What really means 'life' in Greek is 'zōē' and is related to 'zoology' from the word for animals, 'zōion'.

If a column holds up a building, what holds up a head? The Latin word for 'neck' is 'collum' which translates into 'collar' and it is the reason that people talk about collar-bones and shirt-collars which happen to sit on one's neck. Going back to the initial question, some believe that it is related to 'column', which makes some phonological and semantic sense.

When referring to someone from the country, Cyprus, the correct demonym is 'Cypriot'. If, by mistake, one were to write, 'Cyprian' a spell-checking program would not catch the error, for it is also a word. Unfortunately, the meaning of 'Cyprian' is 'prostitute'. Before the early 19th century these words were usually interchangeable, however, canonically Aphrodite was born on Cyprus, so people began to refer the story of the goddess of love euphemistically when talking about prostitutes. 

The king-god of the Romans, was Jupiter. Much like the common exclamation, "oh my God", or 'by God", "by Jove" is ultimately a religious reference. Although 'Jupiter' or 'iupiter' was the name the most powerful God, Latin declines its nouns depending on the function in the sentence. 'Jupiter' is used for the subject, but after that, the stem becomes 'jov-', for example the genitive form ("of Jupiter")–used to signify possession–was 'jovis'. The preposition, 'by' changes the syntax of the proper noun into ablative case which uses the '-e'-ending, so people would have to use the form 'jove'.

Archeologists, upon seeing an artifact, could paint pictures about the history of the past, but only with context. Otherwise, it is just an object with little value in and of itself. Etymology follows that same path. To know that 'aquarium' comes from the Latin meaning 'of water' tells little. Though aquaria of marble have been kept under the beds of those thinking back to ancient Rome, the first public aquarium opened in London in 1853, called "The Fish House". It was only in 1854, in "The Aquarium" by Philip Henry Gosse, millennia after the Romans or Chinese, when the word 'aquarium' was used instead of the common 'aquatic vivarium'. From this point, aquaria boomed in popularity, and so did the word.

Of the similar words 'astronomy' and 'astrology', one was created just to mean 'study of stars' but be distinct from the other. 'Astrology', the older of the two, denotes the practice of 'astronomy', in that it was used for predicting natural happenings and other such things, but it later took the meaning of the use of the stars to predict human-behavior and other more spiritual things. Such that the exact science may be more distinct from the other practices, people came up with 'astronomy' which comes from the Greek for ‘star-arranging’.

The letter-grading system goes A, B, C, D for the passing grades in descending order, but there is no E anymore; it skips to F. The rationale is that none of the first four letters are abbreviations for words: only a representation of grade-intervals, while the F stands for 'failure'.

The word 'annoy' has over time retained its original meaning with only slight differences in connotation. In Middle English the word meant ‘be hateful to’, or sometimes 'attack repeatedly' usually in reference to skirmishes and raids. As may be expected from Middle English-words, it came from the Old French 'anoier' (verb). The original base was the Latin, 'odio' from the phrase "mihi in odio est" meaning ‘it is hateful to me’. The Latin root may not sound at all like the French, but the connection to a hard '-d' and an 'n' would be clear to anyone with a cold. Despite the nasalization in French of certain sounds, 'odious' came to English from the same word in Latin via French as well.

Theoretically, there are infinite possible words that can be produced from a collection of relatively few phonemes, in the same way infinite numbers can be formed by adding other numbers. Often, however, there are trends in the phonological structures of different words, which, simply put, produces a rhyme. Some words don't fall into these such trends, for instance 'month', 'orange', 'silver' or 'purple'*. *This information has been corrected here .

Spelling-bees are a competition on knowing words, yet many people don't understand the words in the name itself. A 'bee' is an old way of saying 'community-gathering' usually for a single purpose. The idiom comes from the way that the insect, bees, act socially in a colony to perform tasks for the greater good. The term is rarely used now, but some peoples still use this phrase, such as the Amish who have knitting-bees, for example.

We call it Mandarin because it is the official language, or more specifically, the official-language. The word came to English, not as a interpretation of the native word, but from a word meaning 'counselor, denoting the Chinese officials, who spoke this dialect. Even the name for the type of orange, comes from the connection to the yellow robes that the officials wore.

What makes a word standard is nothing more than recognition from respectable institutions. In the Oxford English Dictionary there is a record of 'chocolate' as a verb. The word is rarely used at best with only a single recorded quotation catalogue in the OED. It means ‘to drink chocolate’ and the quotation is from an 1850 work called Eldorado which reads ‘We arose in the moonlight, chocolated in the comedor, or dining-hall.’ Even though it is found but once, it is still counted as acceptable.

A good rhetoricician knows how to bend words to his advantage, by definition. Before the Civil War, the general convention was to speak of the United States as a collective entity using the grammatical plural, such as in the 13th amendment's, slavery nor involuntary servitude, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction" (1865). Starting just after that, and in limbo for a few decades thence, people wanted to have an image of a single-body: United States, and so used the singular. This change in the sense of nationalism over regionalism is evidenced by the change in grammatical number.

Often, a single word will create several different derivatives (see the post from yesterday). Other times, what is now a single word would have started as many distinct ones with different morphological and phonological structures. The word 'hood' today takes 3 uses, and 1 as a suffix, but all came from different words. 'Hood' as in the clothing comes from the Old English 'hōd' and is also related to the modern word, 'hat'. The rather dated term for a criminal was abbreviated in the 1930's from 'hoodlum' and likewise the area, 'hood' is from 'neighborhood', which began in the 1970s. The suffix was initially its own word meaning 'person' or 'characteristic' from the Old English '-hād', but eventually took on different grammatical form.

'Maestro' is an Italian word, 'master' was a word in Old English, and 'administrate' comes from Old French, yet they're all related. How‽ The answer is not Proto-Indo-European exactly, but stems from the vast expanse of the Roman empire. All of these words come from 'magister' in Latin has various specific meanings, including 'ship-captain' and 'school-teacher', but none stray far from the idea of leadership.

Argentina, "The Land of Silver", is rich in metals, the mining of which contributes largely to the economy of the country. The nickname, and the official name which comes from the Latin 'argentum' meaning 'silver' was attributed from the Spanish colonizers who believed that the land had rich silver-deposits. Surprisingly, it does not actually have much silver at all.

Often in single languages or whole language families, an individual concept leads to phonological similarities between many words. At first glance, 'weather', 'wander' 'wend' and the verb 'wind' may have vaguely similar sounds, but drastically different meanings. However, all of these words are linked to Old English, and sometimes other Germanic languages, etymologically, but also in that all of the words convey the meaning of something which moves arbitrarily. Over time the words separated but the meanings strayed little from the overarching concept.

Ultimately, standardized spelling does not matter unless to proceed without it would alter the intended interpretation. That being said, it is good to know the difference between 'farther' and 'further'. The simplest but generally accurate tip is that “farther” is for physical, measurable distance and “further” is for figurative distance. Hopefully that is not just an abstract rule, since 'farther' has the word 'far' embedded within. Still, sometimes the distinctions are less clear, such as in 'Billy was further/farther along in his work than Bonny', depending on how the speaker wishes to measure 'work'. Scholars themselves argue about these uses, so really, it does not make much of a difference.

The origin of mustaches is the from face, but the different styles and designations thereof were not that simple. First off, Chinese culture until the last few centuries was far more regional than national (more on that at a later time). As such, Chinese people would and often still do refer to themselves by the different areas, such as Han or Manchu. The style of facial hair, fu manchu is claimed to be originated from comes from Manchuria, based off of the Manchu people.

Slang, phrases and expressions are often difficult to pin down, considering how fickle the words are and from how many sources they may come. Much of the time, only theories–not certainty–prevail. In terms of the word, 'fink', which developed in the late 19th century is hypothesized to come from German, literally meaning, ‘finch,’ but also a pejorative term. Frat-guys at their various houses began to refer to those who weren't members as finks, probably on account of the similarity to the freedom of wild birds, distinct from caged ones. The term was later generalized to denote those not belonging to organizations such as trade unions when the term extended to strikebreakers.

Continuing from yesterday's post, the sound shift occurred between the 5th and 8th centuries that separated Low and High German was not the first major consonant shift, nor was it the only one at the time. What we now know as Germany now was fragmented linguistically and politically into small states up until after the Renaissance. It was partly for this reason that Germany did not colonize the Americas, and tried to later catch up to its rivals which had had more centralized governments by colonizing Africa and attempting to conquer Europe in the World Wars. Only when Martin Luther translated the bible and sold printed versions all over Germany that the language became standardized.

There are a few dialects of German spoken in Germany, but the most commonly known distinction with the most linguistically significant features is the split between High-German (Hochdeutsch) in the south, and Low-German (Plattdeutsch) in the north. The name has nothing to do with geographical positions, or the difference between high-society and low-society (as a Bavarian might want to say), but that High-German is spoken in the mountainous region of Germany, which has a higher elevation that that of Low (flat) German. To give you an idea of the difference, the word for 'day in High-German is 'Tag' but in Low-German which is closer to Scandinavian languages it is 'Dag'.

Many medical terms come from Latin and Greek, which tend to spearate lay-speech from the technical. People here may know 'stat; from perhaps medical procedural show.This word is used in real life as well comes from the Latin 'statim' meaning 'at once'.

A cappella showdown, the competition, ended not so long ago, yet this word is still famously misspelled. The word comes from the Italian, with the literal meaning of ‘in chapel-style.’ This is a reference to the choral style of music, more religiously oriented, without instrumental accompaniment that was the predecessor to a cappella.

'Fault' comes from the Middle English word 'faut(e)' which meant ‘lack, failing’, and was based on the Latin, 'fallere' meaning ‘deceive’. The letter L was added in English and also French in the 15th century in order to create a stronger association with the Latin word, but that did not become standard in English's standardized spelling until the 17th century, though it was not pronounced until the mid-to-late 18th century.

Following the post from yesterday on 'hello' , here is a closer look at the word itself. Originally a verb as well, 'hello', which along with 'holler' is a variant of the rare verb, 'hollo', and is related to the word 'holla' which comes from the French holà, meaning 'ho there', as an order to stop. This is by no means an exhaustive list of the words which are related etymologically to the greeting, 'hello', but of them, this does consider most with related means.

There are a plethora of ways in which one could greet another with a single word, among them, 'hey, 'hi' and 'hello'. Although 'hello' may be considered the most formal, it is not the most established, first appearing only in the late 19th century. 'Hi', on the other hand, was first recorded in late Middle English, and even earlier recordings are found of 'hey'.

To fold a piece of paper makes it twice as thick as it was originally, a fact which ought not to come as a surprise to anyone. Although the word has taken on other uses, in geology, and poker every one of them dates back to the Old English word, 'falden, fealden', in the sense of bending. Even though, the suffix '-fold' as in 'twofold' comes from a different Old English suffx '-fald, -feald', it was always related to the sense of bending something as a means to increase size.

It seems natural to say or yell 'ouch' as a reaction to pain, but it is less simple than that. Though it is true that making noise is a natural way to deal with physical pain, that are all learned over time beginning during childhood, and separate cultures tend to have different exclamations. 'Ouch' became the convention after the vast migrations of Germans influenced the language with their 'autch' of the same pronunciation.

It might seem a peculiar thought for small, non-viking children to be screaming war-cries while playing games but that practice is not so uncommon as we may think. The exclamation 'wee' may seem like something entirely natural for people to say, but the word comes from the Old English 'wīg' meaning 'battle', as troops might have yelled before charging enemy lines.

There are nine different ways to pronounce ‘ough’ in English, and there is no single reason for this complication. Often, words containing 'gh' evolved from a single glottal sound which exists in German as 'ch', and depending on the frequency of usage, and regional accents, the spelling was constant, but pronunciation diverged. In other cases, words were adopted from other languages with different spelling rules, or in the case of 'hiccoughed' the spelling was changed on purpose, but not to match any sound. You can visit the Cambridge Dictionary website to listen to the nine pronunciations.  http://dictionary.cambridge.org/

Some letters, like X, Y, or Z are used so infrequently that often they are grouped together at the end of dictionaries; other letters would be almost impossible to go without. E is the most commonly used letter in the English language, and there is little argument about whether this would differ between spoken and written word, as there are estimates that state that as high as 1-in-8 of all the letters written in English is E. Still, despite the overwhelming presence of E, more words begin with the letter ‘S’ than any other letter of the alphabet.

Some words, generally simpler ideas, are necessary in any language and though they may change over time, they remain more or less the same, such as 'mother' 'tree' or 'yes'. It would seem that bodily functions must be on the list of simple things, but they can be deceptive. To blink is to shut, and reopen the eyes, but the word's early senses included ‘deceive,’ ‘flinch’ or quite specifically, ‘open the eyes after sleep’. The word itself was a  Scots-variation of 'blench', which carried may of the same meanings, except for those of burping, as we think today.

The verb 'to damn' comes from Latin, which should not be a surprise given its biblical and Christian connotations. The Latin word from which 'damn' is derived is 'dam(p)nare' which means ‘inflict loss on,’ and ultimately comes from the participle, 'damnum' meaning ‘loss’. The original meaning is mostly lost (damned) at this point, but it is still retained in the other derivative, 'damage', which does not connote anything religious.

Mastodons are probably best known for their tusks, but that's not what paleontologists thought. 'Mastodon' comes from a compound of the Greek 'mastos' which means ‘breast’ and 'odous, odont-" which means ‘tooth’. Why breasts‽ It is a reference to tubercles on the crowns of the molars which the discoverer saw as nipple-shaped.

To egg someone on could well have been an idiom started by farmers, but it had nothing to do with chickens or eggs themselves originally. To 'egg on' (someone) is a phrase going back to Old English, when there was a word 'eggian' which means 'to incite'.

A workplace casual-Friday is undoubtedly better than casualty-Friday, but etymologically, there is not the same kind of difference. 'Casual' comes from l ate Middle English from the Latin, 'casus' which means ‘fallen’ as it used only to mean something that happened by chance or with irregularity (like falling). 'Casualty' is a derivative of 'casual', in the same, older sense of something accidental, and the '-ty'' was added from the pattern of words like 'penalty'.

In Germanic languages, one can contract nouns together (with a hyphen in English), but in Romance languages, people tend to contract preposition-verb phrases. 'Avail' for example, comes from Middle English's obsolete 'vail' which means ‘be of use or value’. This word is related to 'valor' and is ultimately derived from the Latin 'valere' meaning ‘be strong’. Some believe that 'avail' was created on the pattern of pairs such as 'amount', was originally a verb. First, the contraction was Old French from amont meaning ‘upward,’ or more literally, ‘uphill’ coming from the Latin phrase 'ad montem' of the same meaning.

People take from Greek constantly in order to make new words. This is especially common for the sciences, though in the case of the humanities, scholars often draw from myth. A Pyrrhic victory is one won with such great consequences as to undermine the success. This phrase was coined in the late 19th century after king Pyrrhus who defeated the Romans at Heraclea in 280 BC and Asculum in 279 BC but whose army suffered irrevocable injury.

Although not considered a words (at least not in a morphological sense) doodles and symbols represent ideas in the same way. The $ is no exception. A common folk-theory is that it derives from the figure 8; the justification thereof is that it symbolizes the Spanish eight-bit currency. In fact, the symbol truly comes from a handwritten 'ps', or 'p^s' (if you consider computer notation) which was the abbreviation for 'peso' in Spanish-America.

It is difficult to go to the cinema without hearing an announcement to check for the exits. This is not only safe, but lexically fitting. 'Exit', as well as 'exeunt' (such as Shakespeare's famous direction, "exeunt pursued by a bear" from A Winter's Tale) were first used as stage directions in the mid 16th century from Latin literally meaning ‘he or she goes out,’ in the third or. Through the 17th century, this word was adopted into every-day usage.

Anyone familiar with the French grading-system or counting-system will know that French maths are not base-10 such as is the English custom, but base-20. It might seem then that the word 'score, such as in "four score and seven years ago" must be of French origin, mais non. The modern noun and verb go back to the Old English 'scoru' which denoted a ‘set of twenty,’ and is derived of the Old Norse word, 'skor' meaning ‘notch, or tally", usually of twenty.

'Subconscious' and 'unconscious' are similar in meaning, and synonyms informally, denoting in the lack of awareness or thought. The difference is in context. Most often, when referring to medical or scientific issues, unconscious is the preferable term, whereas 'subconscious' is more appropriate for psychological and most other situations.

'Punk' goes back to the time of Shakespeare; he even uses the word in All's Well that Ends Well, though in those days the word denoted a well-dressed whore. Later, the slang-term denoted a young, often gay, companion of an older hobo. In the twenties, the word came to mean a no-good youth, which is where Dave Marsh probably got his meaning when he coined the term in 1971.

'Porcelain' comes from the Italian word,'porcellana' meaning, ‘cowrie shell,’ because it is smooth. 'Porcellana' however comes from 'porcella' which means 'young sow', because people thought that cowrie shells resembled pig-vulva.

Why do many of the different times of day end with "-ing"‽ The answer––like a good dinner party––begins with the evening. 'Evening' comes from the Old English 'ǣfnung' the infinitive of which is 'ǣfnian' meaning ‘approach evening,’ and ultimately is derived from 'ǣfen' meaning 'to make even', since the evening is a point of equal night and day. This makes 'evening' a conjugated verb (truly, a participle). The literary term 'gloaming' was formed from the Old English 'glōm' ('twilight) for the same reason. 'Morning' was until recently commonly called 'morn', but by the same pattern as 'evening' people started to add the '-ing'. 'Morn', 'even', and 'eve' all are still words though rarely used.

People talk about things in vague terms for unspecified amounts, such as the adjectives 'few' 'several' 'many' 'umpteen' and the nouns 'a bunch' or 'a myriad'. If you noticed something fishy about that list, you're in the minority. 'Myriad' is used to mean "countless", but it comes from the ancient Greek 'murioi' which means 10,000, and is still used in combinations to make larger numbers.

In English, it is difficult to talk about sex. Disregarding any taboos, English is grammatically limiting the verbs we use. Either one could use a transitive verb (one that takes a direct object) which are usually seen as vulgar with a few fairly uncommon exceptions, or one could use an intransitive verb, usually "has sex with", but that is cumbersome and not so direct. This was not the case in all languages. Latin contains plenty of these verbs such as in the infamous line so vulgar it was not published in English until the late 20th century, in Catullus 16: "Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo" Which very roughly could be translated as: "I will sodomize and orally-copulate you [both]"

If one were to read something and then reread it, she would have read it at least twice. 'Lax' and 'relaxed' are not subject to the order in time, which would be difficult to justify simply on the basis that 'lax' is an adjective. That word comes from late Middle English when it meant ‘loose,’ often in terms of one's bowels, and ultimately is derived from Latin 'laxus'. The only difference is that the 're-' expresses intensity.

A number of theories have come up around the meaning of the initialism, S.O.S.,such as "save our ship", "save our souls", or "send out succor". All of these are fairly unlikely given that the true origin is German, dating back to 1905. In truth, S.O.S. is not short for any phrase, but was used because it is easily transmitted in Morse code, as · · · – – – · · ·, and pretty easy to remember.

'Boy' is not an insult or derogatory term by any means, yet the word may easily be used in a demeaning or belittling way, by nature of its definition and the connotations thereof. This was truer still back in the original, middle English sense of the word, which was used to denote a male servant.

Jaywalking isn't something too serious in most cases, but it is illegal. Jaywalking-laws were heavily influenced by propaganda made by car companies in the 1910's to prevent people from walking in the streets. The street used to be a place for everyone but constant car accidents reflected badly on car-manufacturers. In the early 20th century, 'jay' was an insult, similar to modern 'retard', but the term 'jaywalking' became so common that it is used in legal documents.

Plenty of bathrooms, especially in Europe, have bidets. 'Bidet' comes from mid 17th century word which in Old French literally meant ‘pony,’ which comes from the verb 'bider' meaning ‘to trot’. There's no consensus about the origin for that, although some have suggested that position one assumes riding a pony is reminiscent of using a bidet.

The Dutch have had quite an influence over New York City in the 17th century. The borough, Bronx, was named for the (European) owner of the land, Jonas Bronck-a Dutch man who owned the land in the 1600's. When he gave up the land, the spelling changed.  Manhattan is based off of the Dutch Mannahatta, which itself is based off of the Algonquin word for the land. 'Manhattan' is the first Native American place-name known to be recorded by Europeans.  Staten Island, which is an interpretation of the Dutch named "Staaten Eylandt" which literally means "States Island", in honor of the Dutch parliament known as the Staten-Generaal.

The English word 'angst' was directly adopted from German in the 1920's. But why?–The closest equivalent from romantic origin is 'anguish', but when translators attempted to translate Kierkegaard and then Freud, they did not want to settle. Were it not for these great thinkers, there would be much more difficulty than there already is surrounding expressing one's own emotions.

Nowadays, 'filibuster' carries the connotation to politics and legal assemblies, but it did not start out that way. It comes from the 18th century French word, 'flibustier', which first applied to pirates pillaging the Spanish colonies in the West Indies, ultimately from the Dutch, 'vrijbuiter'. In the mid 19th century (the term was used to denote Americans who incited revolution in several Latin American states. Soon after the verb was used to describe tactics employed to sabotage congressional proceedings.

Naked is derived from the Old English word 'nacod' and has Germanic ties to the related modern word 'naakt' from Dutch and 'nackt' from German. These words come from an Indo-European root shared by Sanskrit with the word 'nagna' and Latin's 'nudus'. 'Nude' which also comes from an Indo-European root (originating from 'nudus') is understandably similar in meaning to 'naked'. Nevertheless, the original, Middle English meaning was ‘plain, explicit’, and only gained the modern sense in the 18th century.

What is and is not a word is in constant debate, and really ought to stay there. Slangs get added to the dictionaries every year, giving them academic validity, but all of them were words in the eyes of the populous far beforehand. 'Irregardless' is now a word, defying all argument and even logical sense, since 'regardless' is already made negative by 'less' and needs no prefix. Still, by common usage, this word, perhaps a subconscious blend of 'irrespective' and 'regardless' exists officially in the eyes of academia, but existed long before.

Experiments can be entertaining, and intellectually stimulating, but that comes at a price of hard work. In fact, the work involved is the most lexically obvious part. 'Laboratory' is derived from the medieval Latin word, 'laboratorium', which is ultimately formed from the Latin 'laborare' meaning ‘to labor’.

There is often confusion over the differences between 'burgle', 'rob', and 'steal', and although they are similar, for the sake of clarity it is important to know how they are not the same. 'Burgle' is short for 'burglarize', and involves entering a building to perpetrate a crime, which may involve stealing i.e. thieving something. 'Robbery' is a specific type of stealing, but to fit the definition, one must employ threats or force.

Today, it is very difficult to go anywhere without hearing about computers. Although the electronic has not existed even 100 years, the word is fairly old. The first recorded use of 'computer' in reference to a person who computers was in 1613. The word is known to have been used to refer to a machine since 1869. 'Computer' was used to denote the electronic device first in 1946; before then it was called a "Turing-Machine".

The word 'corridor' evolved over time from the original Latin-meaning. In the 1500's the word corridor was the military term for a strip of land along a ditch. from Latin currere ‘to run’ and actually means ‘running place’. The word comes though French, via the Italian, 'corridoio' meaning ‘running place,’ ultimately from the Latin 'currere' meaning 'to run'. The current sense of ‘a long passage in a building’ dates from the early 1800's.

In English, there are rules which everyone follows but few people realize. When ordering adjectives, there is a precise order which speakers follow in order to sound normal and avoid confusion, as follows from first to last: quantity or number, quality or opinion, size, age, shape, color, proper adjective, and purpose or qualifier––such as the sentence: "Four silly large old round blue Argentinian sagely men rode bikes". "Four sagely men" almost certainly sounds better to any native than "sagely four men" for no other reason than: that's just how it works.

When speaking about an especially toned man one might refer to his six-pack, relating his chest to cans of beer or soda. In French, one might instead refer to his "tablettes de chocolat", referring to the shape of a chocolate-bar. It would seem that across cultural lines, terms to describe fitness are unhealthy parts of a diet.

Everyone knows sarcasm; all comedy would be entirely different without it. What not everyone knows is where it originates. The word came to English in the mid 1500's, adopted from either the French, 'sarcasme', or through late Latin. Whichever, the word ultimately derives from the late Greek word, 'sarkasmos', which meant ‘gnash the teeth, speak bitterly". It was the evolved version of the Greek, 'sarkazein' meaning a far more extreme ‘tear flesh'.

The sun has always had great significance in the development of civilizations, and that effects some words to be created. 'Daisy' is an Old English compound, from the words, 'dæges ēage' which means ‘day's eye’, which was given on account of the way in which flower opens in the morning, then closes at night.

If not from personal experience, then from entertainment, most people know the abbreviation xo for "kiss and hug". According to the Oxford English dictionary, the first recorded use of an x was to represent a kiss was found in a letter from the Naturalist, Gilbert White, in 1763.

"Sing, sang, sung" are some forms of one of many verbs which would prove useful to anyone who wished to confuse children and non-Native speaker. English is full of these exceptions––right‽ Nope; this is not an exception. Verbs like this, in which the stem changes to show tense instead of having suffixes added (like 'd' or 't'), are called "strong-verbs". Strong-verbs tend to follow similar patters, such as the past tense of all these words having an 'a': 'swam', 'sang', 'rang', 'began', 'ran' and so forth. Almost all of these kinds of verbs date back to the patterns of Old English conjugation.

Muses by nature inspire art and creativity. Moreover, the word 'muse' has inspired how we think about art less directly. 'Music' derives from the Greek word "mousikē (tekhnē )" which means ‘(art) of the Muses,’ ultimately from 'mousa', the word for ‘muse’. Likewise, 'mosaic' derives from the French 'mosaïque', which gets its origins from the Greek 'mousa'.

Statistically, a new word is added to the dictionary every two hours, which is to say that in a year, almost 4000 new words are added. This could be from anywhere, but usually it is a word belonging to pop-culture, or it is borrowed from another language. Of course, words are dropped from dictionaries all of the time from lack of popular usage.

'Shindig' is a relatively recent word which has undergone almost as many changes as the format for Facebook in any given month. It came to English in the mid 19th century with influence later from 'shindy', a word that itself is considered to be an alteration of 'shinty', a Scottish game similar to modern field hockey. The name of the game is from an even earlier word, 'shinny' supposedly deriving from from the chant "shin ye, shin you, shin t' ye" which was used in the game.

It is easy to point out from where words derive, especially with caches of data available in books and online. Still, far more important is the reason or context behind any given word being used, instead of any other collection of sounds. 'Book' comes from Old English, 'bōc' which meant ‘a document or charter’, related to the word 'bōcian' which meant ‘to grant by charter'. Arguably more interesting is that it is related to the modern word, 'beech', the material onto which Germanic tribes carved runes.

It's Thursday, or in German, 'Donnerstag': a word made from the combination of 'Donner' which means 'thunder' and the word for 'day'. 'Thursday' itself comes from the Old English 'Thu(n)resdæg' meaning ‘day of thunder,’ named after Thunor; the word for thunder itself and a god who was the Saxon equivalent of the Norse, Thor. This all comes from the Roman tradition of naming weekdays after planets, which were in turn were named after gods. The late Latin, "Jovis dies" meaning "day of Jupiter" equates Thor (Thunor) with Jupiter, and is where Romantic days of the week, like French's 'Jeudi', originate.

Not just in English, but in every single other language, certain sounds and combinations thereof will almost certainly have some sort of connection to their meanings, the way that it is easy to guess which of these two teachers mean one in Jane Eyre: Miss Temple or Miss Scatchard. It may then come to a surprise to hear that ‘pilliwinks', a word that sounds childish, is a brutal torture devise found in Scotland, used for squeezing fingers between ever-compressing bars of metal.

Spiders are known for many things, such as the need to use a flamethrower around any general vicinity where there is even a small chance of finding a spider, but the Anglo-Saxons seemed to notice something else. 'Spider' comes from the late Old English 'spīthra' , from 'spinnan' an Old English word meaning, ‘draw out and twist fiber’, based on the way in which spiders spin webs.

A cobweb is spider's web which is old or uninhabited. This word, however was not always so specific in meaning. Back in Middle English the word, "coppeweb" or, "copweb", was a contraction of the words 'coppe' which is simply an obsolete word for ‘spider’, and 'web'.

Caxton was merchant, diplomat, and writer, but is most famous for printing. He introduced a printing press into England in 1476, and in 1477, printed the first book in English, later becoming a bookseller. Most of the books which he printed were in English, and he translated and edited work himself, such as Aesop's Fables. Though he was focused on translating in the most linguistically exact way possible, demand combined with his poor translating-skills led to adoption of lots of French words into English and many misunderstandings. Nevertheless, the works that Caxton was charged to print were in many dialects, and as a result, his efforts to standardize English–if only regionally–led to a regularization of syntax and inflection, as well as an increase of written history. For more on this, see yesterday's post .

Nietzsche's famous work "die Geburt der Tragödie: aus dem Geiste der Musik", is often translated as "The Birth of Tragedy: out of the Spirit of Music". In this instance, 'Geist(e)' would mean "spirit". In the word 'Poltergeist', 'poltern' means "to cause a disturbance", and 'Geist', would mean 'ghost', as to express the sense of evil which 'spirit' just can't in English. This kind of German-ambiguity existed back in Old English, when the word 'gāst' meant 'spirit' or 'ghost' or even 'soul'. People think that the silent 'h' was adopted by Caxton from Flemish spelling style.  More on Caxton tomorrow.

The word 'narcissistic' comes from the word Narkissos or Narcissus, from Greek mythology (although the name for the flower comes from 'narkissos, which some say is derived from 'narkē' meaning ‘numbness,’after its narcotic effects). Narcissus, for those whom don't know, was a man who was so overcome with his own beauty that he looked at his reflection and fell in love with himself. Echo, a nymph, met Narcissus and fell in love with him, but due to a curse, was only able to repeat what others said. This gave us the word 'echo' which ultimately comes from the Greek for, 'sound'. English owes much to this myth.

Anagrams are words out of which the rearranged letters make a new word, or set of words. For instance all of the letters in, "twelve plus one" are the same as in "eleven plus two" is an anagram. These words are entirely random, so when coincidences such as the fact that Japan's former capital city, Kyoto, and present capital, Tokyo, are anagrams of each other, or the Kingdom of Java's former capital, Kartasura and then later Surakarta (now moved to Surabaya) are anagrams, it is nothing more than luck. Less coincidental is the way that people often like to seek them out for fun, such as Louis XIII, who appointed a Royal Anagrammatist for entertainment.

An ambigram is a word written such that when it's turned upside-down, reads the same word. However cool that idea is, it's not a linguistic feature of words in any language, because it relies on fonts. Depending on the font, 'swims' could be an ambigram, or it could not be; ambigrams are largely if not entirely dependent on the script, and shape of the letters.

A 'pangram' is a sentence or a short piece of writing which contains every letter in the alphabet. For an example in English, “the quick, brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” is a pangram. Pangrams are loosely defined however, and as such, other languages, like Arabic which uses a script in which letters change shape depending on their position, and like Hebrew, uses diacritical marks to represent what would be in English, vowels, make pangrams rather up to interpretation. Make sure to read about 'ambigram' tomorrow, and 'anagram' Thursday.

“I am” is the shortest complete sentence in the English language, since it contains the shortest subject, and the shortest verb (as conjugated). Although "I'm" as a contraction would be shorter, forms of 'to be' don't get contracted at the end of English sentences, and would therefore not count. Some people argue that 'go' would be the shortest so long as it is considered to be imperative, but since it would be circumstantial, it would be a hard case to argue.

'Teach' is related to the Greek 'deiknunai', and Latin 'dicere'. Similarly, 'heart' is related to the Latin, 'cord' and Greek 'kardia', of the same meaning. The fact that these two words of Germanic origin are related to Latin or Greek ought to not be too surprising. While the Greek and Latin sound the same, English's word is more different, and the reason is: sound-shifts. Words from romance languages that have a 'c' beginning tended to keep it, while in Germanic languages it turned into an 'h', such as 'heart' or also 'house' (Eng) 'Haus' (German) and 'casa' (Spanish). Like in both 'heart' and 'teach' romantic "d's" tended to turn into "t's". 

'Girl' used to mean just mean, small child, whether boy or girl, from the time of Old English through Modern English. This is not like the way that Romance languages lump the sense of "girls and boys" or also just "boys" into the masculine forms, but simply the meaning of one word, similar to the way that 'man' meant–in Old English–'human', separate from the other words for 'man' and 'woman', which you can see more about here .

Humans make mistakes, and, believe it or not, linguists are humans. There are some words in certain dictionaries which appeared on account of printing-errors but mean nothing. The word “dord” appeared in some dictionaries for eight years in the mid-20th century. This sort of word is called a “ghost word”.

Not only is English the lingua franca, but English is the language of the air. With planes whizzing through the air, over national borders and language, there needs to be some consistency with language for clarity and emergency. To communicate all pilots have to identify themselves in, and speak in English, regardless of their native languages.

Words that people say though they contribute nothing of meaning or value to the sentence are called "crutch words". These words come in all shapes and sizes, such as, 'but', 'um', 'well', 'basically', 'actually' and the much hated, 'like'. My least favorite, is when people preface their opinions with, 'personally'.

It's Super Tuesday! You probably noticed that Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump speak with different accents, even though they are both from NYC, born in the 1940's only around 5 years apart. At this point in history, accents were changing to try to distinguish ourselves from the English. Before WWII, the Americans employed the non-rhotic 'r', which is when the 'r' is dropped following a vowel, preceding a consonant (such as in 'hard'), like the way the English still pronounce words. This persisted in rural areas and working class areas, explaining why Sanders uses it (having grown up in working class Brooklyn) while Trump, having been born into money, uses the rhotic 'r'.

"Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis" is a type of lung disease caused by inhaling ash and dust, and is considered the longest word in English. In German, the longest word is: "siebenhundertsiebenundsiebzigtausendsiebenhundertsiebenundsiebzig" which is the number 777,777, because German numbers under a million can be compounded.  Other, polysynthetic languages like Algonquin or Greenlandic can make even longer words easily; the words in those languages can express whole clauses.

What happens when there is an idea, but no word to support it?–Make up a new one. If someone is acting like an uncle, one might say that he is 'avuncular'. If someone is acting aunt-like, it would be difficult to describe, so 'materteral' was invented.

The two peoples of Belguim, the Flemish and the Walloons consider themselves ethnically different. 'Walloon' comes from the Old English, 'Welisc, Wælisc', from a Germanic word meaning ‘foreigner’, and you will notice that this is the same etymology as for 'Welsh', and is similar to the Latin word 'Volcae', the name of a Celtic people in southern Gaul.

'Coarse' and 'course' are similar in spelling, but used to be closer related. 'Coarse' in late Middle English 'meant' ‘ordinary or inferior’. Up until the 1800's, the word was spelled 'course'. The differentiation is possibly from a sense, ‘habitual or ordinary manner’, like we still say for 'day's course'. Both words derive from the Latin verb 'currere' meaning 'to run'.

Heaven is a complicated subject, but in the Christian faith, it is often represented as being in the sky. Book 1 chapter 3 of Confessions by St. Augustine starts with "caelum" in a sentence ("Capiunt ergone te caelum et terra...?"), meaning 'sky' but with the meaning in English of 'heaven'. Heaven is not only represented as the sky, but it is the sky. 'Heaven' even comes from the Old English 'heofon', which is related to the modern German word, 'Himmel' which means 'sky'.

Dublin comes from 'Dubh Linn' meaning "black pool" after the lake in which the Vikings moored their boots. Even the other name, Baile Átha Cliath (Irish name), meaning "town of the hurdle ford" has Viking influence. It is a description of the bank of wooden hurdles built up across the river Liffey by the Vikings. In fact, in 770 AD, a band of Bon Valley-raiders were drowned crossing the Liffey at the hurdle ford.

Algebra: complicating and seemingly never-ending, not so different from its etymology. The word is from late Middle English via Italian, via Spanish, via medieval Latin, from the Arabic 'al-jabr' meaning ‘the reunion of broken parts,’ as in ‘bone setting’. The original sense was ‘the surgical treatment of fractures’. The mathematical sense comes from the title of a book, " ʿilm al-jabr wa'l-muḳābala" which means ‘the science of restoring what is missing and equating like with like,’ written by al-Ḵwārizmī. In summation, broken limbs are not so distinct from math.

Between books, graphic novels, and movies pertaining to the Wild West, it is hard not to come across the mention of buffalo. Funny enough, buffalo don't live in the North American plains; what is actually being referenced are American Bison. Buffalo is more a nickname that came from early French explorers in the Louisiana Territory who called the animals, "les bœufs", which is a 'bull'.

Anyone who wants to becomes part of a french-speaking mafia-family, ought to learn at least one slang word. In English, since the 1960's or before, "the dough" was an expression meaning "the money", and it is still in use today. In French, the phrase "le blé" is used as one of many slang-words for money, and similar to English, it means, "the wheat", probably because bread is such a basic commodity.

'Berserk' as an adjective comes from an early 19th century word from the noun 'berserker'. Ultimately, this word comes from the Old Norse, 'berserkr' (noun), but further roots are debated. Either–and more likely–the word comes from 'birn-', 'bjǫrn' meaning the animal, 'bear' and serkr ‘coat,’ but some people believe that the origins are from 'berr' meaning ‘bare’ as in 'without armor'.

Linguists can reconstruct Proto-Indo-European to by looking at the huge similarities between more modern languages (for perspective, Latin would be considered modern). This society existing over 5,000 years ago or more had a word for "son's wife" and "brother's wife" but not "sister's husband" nor "daughter's husband". Besides the basic family units, we also know that there was a word for "husband's brother", "husband's mother", "husband's father" but not the same for wife's anyone. There was even a word, 'vedmo' meaning, "bride-price". This is useful anthropologically because it suggests that a wife left her family to join her husband's, but not the other way around.

There are no written records from the Proto-Indo-European people. Still, linguists can take the enormous similarity between languages, dead or living, and piece together the long-extinct language. This is both a linguistic achievement, as well as an anthropological one. For example, there is a Sanskrit word, 'dyáus-píter' denoting a powerful god, in Greek, there was 'zéu-páter" which was the original name for 'Zeus', and the Romans had a head-god, 'Iu-piter" (Jupiter). All of this suggests that there was a supreme god who's name meant "Sky Father" to the Proto-Indo-European people. More on PIE tomorrow, and don't forget to submit for this month's challenge.

People may know the word 'squire' from books or film pertaining to the European Middle Ages. 'Squire' is simply a shortened for of the of Old French word, 'esquier', or 'esquire' which is now commonly associated with lawyers, seeing as it is their title. The Old French word comes from the Latin, 'scutarius' which means ‘shield-bearer,’ itself deriving from scutum which means, ‘shield’, as esquires are supposed to protect.

Señor is, in Spanish, the title equivalent to Sir. or Mr. in English used for address or respect. 'Sir' is a Middle English reduction of the word, 'Sire'. 'Sire' derives from Old French as an alteration of the Latin word, 'senior', from which the word , 'Señor' also finds its origins.