Word Facts

According to the BBC, the most unpopular word in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia is 'moist', so there is a good chance that many of you don't like the word; nevertheless, it does have an interesting etymology. The word ultimately comes from the Latin 'mucidus' meaning 'moldy', but it was also influenced by the word 'musteus' meaning ‘fresh’, even though those two ideas are not necessarily related. The word is also related to the noun 'must', both as it relates to grape juice and also dampness (but not the frenzied state of certain animals during mating-season). Concerning the former, 'must' meaning "grape juice before or during fermentation" comes from that same Latin word for 'fresh' while the other 'must', or to be more precise, 'musty' is thought to come from an alteration of the word 'moist', also influenced by the grape juice sense of 'must'. Despite that variety of words to whi...

Old English would look alien to anyone who speaks Modern English; partly this is because of the inflection—all the verbs were conjugated and all the nouns decline—and also the vocabulary was quite different. As Old English is a dead language however, pronunciation would not always be one of the reasons people may have difficulty learning it, but there were some significant differences. One way in which this differs is that G was pronounced /g/ such as in 'gum' today, but before certain vowels would become closer to /j/ as in 'yum' or 'yellow'. In Beowulf, one of the most famous Old English texts, the hero is Geatish, but while people now usually pronounce that /git/ (approximately 'geet') in Old English it would have been /jaət/ (approximately 'ya-ut').

Every language will have a lot of so called "rules", but so long as someone is understood, exceptions can appear. One feature of English that tends not to be too flexible is that word-order indicated the syntax of the word, so "the man bites the dog" means something different from "the dog bites the man. It is not usually possible to begin with a grammatical object before the verb like it is in languages that indicate this morphologically, such as Latin, but still there are a  few exceptions, such as the colloquial phrase, "what say you?". Another feature is that prepositions are necessary to indicate motion to/from somewhere. If going to a store, or to a city, the word 'to' is necessary for example, but this isn't the case with the word 'home', as that is implied, as in "I'm going home" rather than "I'm going to home". Normally, the only words that do not need 'to' in this case are adverbs like ...

Everything that it said about the theorized language of Proto-Indo-European is all based on comparing Indo-European languages that are studied now, both living and dead languages. Some linguists have noted a trend in which words meaning 'give' often are related to words meaning 'take' etymologically. Sometimes these words no longer have those meanings and the only reason we know of any relation is from historical documents, but there are also some more obvious ones. The word 'give' for example, is Germanic from a Scandinavian origin and is similar to other words that have the same meaning in Germanic languages, unsurprisingly. It is thought, however, to also be related to the Latin word 'habēre' meaning 'have' or 'hold'.

The most common reason that a language goes extinct is that it is seen as more sensible to teach children a language that is spoken by a large group of people as opposed to a regional language; doing so gives a person, potentially, more options financially. Nevertheless, sometimes people also abandon languages because it is not what is taught in schools, or because they face discrimination for using it. With Bungi for instance—a creole language of mostly Scots English with in fluence from Orcadian Scots, Scottish Gaelic, Cree and Ojibwe—now thought to be extinct, researchers found that the speakers were embarrassed to use it. The accent was noticeably different from Standard English, and they faced discrimination from English speakers, but also they were not intelligible to Cree or Ojibwe speakers. Most of the time, people opted to teach their children Standard English due to those problems, as well as the fact that it was a minority language and was not taught in schools, so not very ...

The expression "holy cow" is a fairly versatile one denoting surprise and alarm, but it has nothing to do with cows. It does, however, relate to 'holy', in a way, as, much like ' gadzooks ' and other expressions, this was a way that people got around saying certain religious terms like 'G*d' or in this case 'Christ' in vain. Much like most of those other expressions relating to the supernatural in a euphemistic way that are used in English, this is from the Victorian Era, with the first documented use appearing in 1905, though it was likely used earlier in speech.

For those who come across an unfamiliar word, especially those learning a new language, affixes can be quite helpful in figuring out what it means. The suffix '-er', for example, can be added to most verbs to make nouns meaning "agent of [verb]", except with some words like 'over' for which the ending was just coincidental; 'over' is also not a noun, so it wouldn't be an exception to that rule anyway. The suffix '-or' performs a similar function as '-er' in that it denotes so meone who does whatever action was indicated with the verb. A person who creates is a 'creator' and someone who conducts is a 'conductor', but this process does not always go both ways, as a 'doctor' is not someone who 'docts' nor is a 'janitor' someone who janits. Theoretically, both of those aforementioned verbs could exist in English through back-formation, but because they both come from Latin words that look quite di...

Many of the words and swears that we use now connoting sex tend to relate more to women than men. This happened in Old English to possibly even greater an extent, as many word that related to promiscuity and seduction as well tended to be feminine grammatically, though the significance of this is debatable. The word 'harlot' today is used as an insult or a somewhat dated synonym to 'prostitute', almost always if not entirely directed at women. This wasn't always the case however, and in Middle English the word denoted a vagabond or lecher, and would be used to refer to a man or a woman. In fact, the word originates from the Old French 'harlot' meaning a '(poor) young man' specifically.