Word Facts

As a rule, nouns can be verbalized by no more than putting the word in the environment of a verb and conjugation it where needed, such as for instance after a pronoun: "water" to "I water" However, this is not universally true. 'Fact' cannot be verbalized, but other semantically related words like 'evidence', 'rumor', or indeed 'lie' can be. And even so-called 'factive verbs' like 'know' exist too. Support Word Facts on patreon.com/wordfacts

Not only does the Italian national anthem mention Poles, but the original name of the Polish national anthem too translates as "Song of the Polish Legions in Italy" ("Pieśń Legionów Polskich we Włoszech"). The latter case has a more obvious relation to Italy as it was written to boost the morale of Polish soldiers fighting in Italy during the French Revolutionary wars, when at that point, no Polish state existed at all. In the Italian anthem, Poles are mentioned alongside other groups who suffered against the Austrians: "Already the Eagle of Austria (già l'Aquila d'Austria) "Has lost its plumes. (le penne ha perdute) "The blood of Italy, (Il sangue d'Italia) "the Polish blood..." (il sangue Polacco) Support Word Facts on  patreon.com/wordfacts

Lots of words stem from 'cot', including 'cottage', 'coterie', 'cote', and 'cot' (as in a barn or hut) which all relate to dwelling, but 'cot' (as in a camp-bed) is not among these. In fact, all of those have other related terms in Indo-European languages like Old Norse and Latin, but 'cot' comes from a Hindu word  खाट (khāṭ) meaning 'bedframe'. See more on word families here .

It has been discussed here before how words "on the tip of one's tongue" may still be remembered to have a certain onset, for instance. The Tip of the Tongue (ToT) effect doesn't only include memory of the first letter; it also can include the number of syllables or prosodic accent pattern, as well as internal vowels. Vowels especially, as well as consonants in unaccented syllables, do not figure importantly into the ToT pattern though.

Pleonasm , even in translations, is a notable fixture of the Bible. This is not the same as clunky writing, which you can see more about in the linked Word Facts video , but often appears as using many separate expressions to indicate the same thing. This is particularly notable in Psalms, and one explanation could be that because there wasn't much literary tradition before it that it mirrors speech, as the level of pleonasm found in speech is similar. However, pleonasm is also common in poetry or lyrics, it may well be a poetic styling.

Pleonasm —essentially linguistic redundancy—can exist for many reasons. Sometimes it is just idiomatic, like French "Qu'est-ce que c'est?" meaning 'what's that?" but literally meaning "what is it that it is?", but in some languages it has an a grammatical function. In German, "die alten Männer sprechen" (the old men are talking) features a plural marker in every word of this sentence even though only using a plural noun would suffice; anything else would be ungrammatical in German. Support Word Facts on patreon.com/wordfacts

Although English is known to be amalgamated from different languages' lexicons, other languages take this to a redundant extreme. For instance, many languages have pleonasm—basically redundancy—like 'tuna fish' in English or 'Yo te amo' in Spanish, where the '-o' indicates the first person without the need for a pronoun 'Yo'. Some languages, and in particular Yiddish , have this feature bilingually. These are sometimes called bilingual tautological expressions, and in this case it usually relies on having a Yiddish and Hebrew word or phrase back-to-back. For instance, the phrase 'חמור-אייזל' (khamer-eyzl) is used to denote a womanizer, but literally means 'donkey-donkey' in Hebrew and then in Yiddish respectively. Expect more on this tomorrow. Support Word Facts on patreon.com/wordfacts

'Clout' today has many meanings, including "a heavy blow" and an "influence or power", but a more traditional meaning would have been "to mend a cloth". The origin of this discrepancy is still not totally understood, however the sense of a "heavy blow" does date back to the Middle English. Some may suggest that the sense comes from a connection of 'putting a patch on' to 'hitting hard', but this relation is fairly loose. Support Word Facts at patreon.com/wordfacts