Word Facts

Though not always the case, it is common that English counties will just be named for their county towns' names. Often this is with adding the suffix '-shire', as with 'Oxford' to 'Oxfordshire', or 'Worcester' to 'Worcestershire'. There are exceptions, both to the suffixes and to the names totally, but in a few cases the county may still end in '-shire' but the county town is unrelated. Usually this is because of the historical county town no longer holding power, but in the case of 'Shropshire', there is not nor has there ever been a 'Shrop'. The demonym  is 'Salopian' and the county town is 'Shrewsbury', but initially in Old English the county was 'Scrobbesbyrigscīr'; note that 'sc' in Old English is [ʃk] (like SHk). While 'Salop' comes from the Norman interpretation of this name too, 'Scrobbe'—which was probably a personal name—only became 'Shrews(bury)' throug...

In the US and Canada, many of the place names either come from native words, are named after places in the Old World , or were named as a description of the land; in at least one case however, it may be all of those. The name for the French colonies in North America (mostly modern-day Quebec and some surrounding areas) was called 'Acadia' ('Acadie'). It is not totally certain where this comes from though. Likely, this comes from the ancient Greek city Arkadía (Ἀρκαδία) described in pastoral poetry. However, it is also not unlikely that the word comes from the native Mi'kmaq word 'akadie' meaning 'fertile land'. In situations like this, one could have reinforced the other, depending upon the initial intentions, but no matter what, this is also where the word 'Cajun' comes from, as the Louisianan French mostly migrated from Canadian colonies, but kept the name.

The number of adjectival or nominal suffixes may sometimes feel gratuitous; in theory it would only be necessary to have one or two. However, unlike with ‘ depth’ and the newer ‘deepness’ , not all of these are so flexible or so random. For instance, ‘sulfurous’ and ‘sulfuric’ both mean, broadly speaking, ‘of sulfur’, yet these two are not totally interchangeable. In the names of chemicals, ‘-ic’ denotes a higher valence for the element; that is to say it denotes how easily it can combine with other particles. This is true of lots of other elements as well, where ‘-ous’ is used for both general use and for denoting lower valence, but ‘-ic’ is for a specific type.

Suffixes can have lots of different meanings, but due to English's history, sometimes they can seem quite random. For instance, '-ic' is a productive adjectival suffix that can be added to nouns like 'artist' and 'artistic', or 'sulfur' to 'sulfuric' (more on this tomorrow). In the case of 'rust' and 'rustic' however, there isn't a relation. 'Rust' comes from a word meaning 'red' and is shared with many other words that relate to clay-like dirt, including ' rubric ', but 'rustic' does not. However, while 'rust' was from a Germanic root, 'rustic' comes from the Latin meaning 'countryside', related to 'rural'. It is possibly that these words share a very old derivation, but either way, the appearance in English is only coincidental now.

People are very good at finding patterns and other relations such that any overlapping connotation an idea has can be tacked onto the relevant word. Like how 'point' can denote a specific position, ideologically or physically and geographically, but originally had the meaning of something that tapers sharply, 'pick' came from 'prick'. Indeed, both 'point' and 'pick' mean 'something being pointed to' or 'something being pricked' (i.e. gestured at by poking ). This sort of semantic transfer will naturally happen over time in any language. Check out recent Patreon post: https://www.patreon.com/posts/18918274

There are many times when a commonly used word will lead to the creation of other words. For instance, ' alcoholic ' lead to the combining form '-aholic' which relates to any type of addiction, such as commonly 'workaholic', but this can also be done with any other noun. That is slightly informal, but that informality is not always the case. In linguistics, the combining form '-lect' from 'dialect' can be tacked onto other words in order to indicate that it relates to anything dialectal. For instance, 'basilect' is the academic term for the least prestigious (or at least little-prestigious) dialect for a given language.

Sometimes, a pop-culture reference will make its way into common parlance. With the word 'catch 22'—which grammatically is not two words when used as such—can refer to a paradoxical situation or logical fallacies depending upon the idea at hand. It comes from the title of a 1961 book in which the main character pretends to be insane to avoid combat, but his actions are taken to prove his sanity. However, it is possible that many of the people who would use this phrase have not read the book, as now the reference is no longer just a reference, and can exist in its own right.

Now, a pejorative for French people, though fairly harmless now, is 'froggie'. It is said to have come from the common trope of French peasants eating frogs, but this was not the first use of the pejorative 'froggie' in English's history. Earlier than this, it was used to refer to the Dutch , as they were caricatured as swamp-dwellers; this changed after the Anglo-Dutch Wars, after which point France became Britain's main enemy, rather than the Dutch. Check out recent Patreon post: https://www.patreon.com/posts/18918274