Word Facts

If even proper nouns have cultural relevance, then they can become any type of other words. For instance, the town of Derby in England is home to an early horse race, started in 1780. Once this race became well-known enough, and because the city is small enough to not necessarily be confused with other activities, it began to be used not just as a denotation for other horse races—though this is also true such as in the famous Kentucky Derby—but for any other type of competitive sport, even though it now only has historical relation to the city most of the time. Check out the new video released today:  https://youtu.be/PKXEg15Etk0

A lot of places are named for their directions, but this only works when the direction are relative. For instance, the East Indies and the West Indies are named so for their relation relative to India as is fairly clear from the name, but a name like ' Austria ' which denotes the south, or its native German name ' Österreich ' meaning 'Eastern Empire' is all in relation to the other German states, though there is a (not particularly important) discrepancy here because it is indeed both south or east depending upon which German states are being selected. However, this gets even more thrown off considering The Philippines , which were named in Spanish first as Islas del Poniente (Islands of the West) not because much is very close in that direction except a very large ocean, but because it was sailed to from Spain first from the West, even though it is much closer to Spain from the East. Ultimately, because the Earth is round, directional names like this don't...

Chances are, most people don't know the name for a louse-egg, even though this is part of a phrase many might use daily. 'Nitpicking' is the process of being scrupulous about unimportant details, but very few people would know that a 'nit' is a louse-egg, and ridding oneself of these very tiny things—historically by hand—is 'nit-picking'. This just goes to show the way in which compounds like these—even though they have a very sensible summative meaning unlike ' butter-fly '—exist on their own, and not necessarily by mentally combining the elements.

'The' in the names of countries does happen sometimes, but it is usually purposeful. In the case of 'The Netherlands', it is named so because of the flat area, especially compared to the German highlands, even though in German the name is simply 'Niederlande' without the article before. With Ukraine, often said as 'the Ukraine' in English, this is because the name derives from the meaning of 'borderland' and so while 'the Ukraine' has never been official, it caught on and stuck. In the case of the Philippines, there is less of a reason now, but originally the Spanish name was Las Islas Filipinas, and so while now no name for the nation includes overt reference to the islands, there is a sort of covert reference.

It's not such a bad thing to be humbled generally, but 'eating humble pie' used to actually refer to food. The 'humble' in question came from an earlier 'numbles' or sometimes 'umbles' which denoted the entrails of a deer. These would be given out to the lowest status people to eat, so while for a wealthy or noble person to eat numbles pie would be a humbling experience, this word was only used in the phrase as it is today because of similar sounds and later misunderstanding completely. There will be more on this tomorrow. Check out recent Patreon post: https://www.patreon.com/posts/18918274

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.