The differences between American and British English are of course numerous, and I’ve touched on them before. One area that’s always intrigued me though is food.
Hold the Cilantro
Author: Niall O'Donnell
A Parliament of Owls
While watching the news yesterday, I was suddenly struck with an epiphany about the etymology of the word parliament.
Groovy
I’m not sure what made me think of the word groovy this morning. Lord knows it’s not a word you hear often these days. But as I thought about it, I considered how it’s odd how we can refer to the rhythm of a song, as well as channel cut into a surface, as a groove. Sure, sometimes two different words can arrive at the same spelling and sound from different sources, but I assumed that groove in a musical sense was too modern not to be related to the already-existing groove.
It’s the Little Things
Learning any language is never easy. It takes a lot of time, and patience, and practice. But above all, it requires mental readjustment. And that’s the part that a lot of people find the most difficult.
Envision and Envisage
There’s a good chance you only use one of these words, if you use one at all, and it’s probably envisage. And that’s all you really need. Both can basically mean the same thing: to imagine something, specifically to conjure up a mental image.
There is a slight distinction between the two though, if you want to know exactly how to use them to impress a language nerd.
Petrol or Gasoline?
It’s probably pretty well-known that gasoline and petrol are the same thing, being the American- and British-English terms respectively for the same fuel.
It’s not unusual for their to be such marked differences between the words for the same thing in both varieties of English. But I’ve always been curious as to why the words are so different, especially considering that petrol has a fairly logical etymology.
Stranger Things
Strange can be a strange word. If I asked you to explain it, you’d probably have no problem. It means weird, unusual, not normal. Easy.
Now though, think of words related to strange.
You can probably think of strangely, stranger, and estranged. OK, strangely is the adverb form of strange, but what’s the link with the other two words?
