Curious Constraints 2: the blameless bald
Writing which responds to curious typographical constraints has a long and eccentric history. Hucbald (c. 850 – 930), Frankish monk and godfather of music theory, is best remembered (by those who...
View ArticleEtymology for adults
I have just come across a thrillingly imaginative bit of etymological scholarship, and I wanted to summarise it briefly for the non-Spanish-speakers among my readership. I was interested in the...
View ArticleMyriad myriads
Yesterday, in Mario Vargas Llosa’s La Fiesta del Chivo, I came across a word I didn’t know. It was: miríada. For my sins, I am accustomed to skipping over words that I don’t recognise, particularly in...
View ArticleThe etymology of slave (and robot)
The word slave comes from the Byzantine Greek σκλάβος, via Middle Latin Sclavus, from which root Italian gets schiavo, French esclave, and Spanish esclavo. The original meaning of the word was ‘Slav’,...
View ArticleThe Spanish word for left
Basque loanwords abound in contemporary Spanish. They include caspa, dandruff, manteca, lard (origin of mantequilla, butter), pestaña, eyelash (and now ‘tab’ in the sense of internet browser), and...
View ArticleThe curious etymology of gloss
Glossolalia is a lovely word. It means ‘speaking in tongues’, or, as Wikipedia has it, ‘the fluid vocalizing…of speech-like syllables, often as part of religious practice’. Let’s leave aside the...
View ArticleMore unexpected etymologies…
Today, some unexpected etymologies. All of the following words have become so deeply embedded in English that I, for one, would never have imagined they were borrowings from sundry other languages....
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