Fido

Yesterday, for some reason, I was thinking about when I read the comic book Tintin au Tibet to practise my French. My mind then wandered to the fact that Tintin’s dog’s name is Milou in the original French (Snowy in English). I clearly had nothing better to be doing, because I then dwelled upon the fact that superficially, Milou has no obvious meaning*, unlike Snowy. Just, I thought, like English-language dogs’ names like Fido.

But then I thought: maybe Fido does mean something… Continue reading →

Let the Negotations Begin

I discovered an interesting bit of etymology recently. I was reading SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard. In a chapter about work and business, she mentioned a Latin word  – otium. Continue reading →

Ph or F?

Have you ever wondered why both F and Ph can have the same sound in English?

Phone, philosophy, Philadelphia: force, far, fair etc. Continue reading →

2020 Vision

Happy New Year!

The time does fly, doesn’t it? Continue reading →

Crummy!

I was reading Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles the other day when at one point, a character described the eponymous heroine as “a crummy girl.” As with many of Hardy’s novels, which are full of 19th-century English West-Country dialect, there was an explanatory note. I was going to pass over it, as there are many such notes, and I don’t want to interrupt my reading flow by stopping for each one. Plus, the meaning was pretty clear from the context: it obviously meant attractive.

Continue reading →

Back for Good

I used the expression for good recently, in the standard way, meaning forever. And then I thought: why do we use for good in this way? Continue reading →

Still Life

I can’t say I’ve ever spent a lot of time thinking about the term still life. I do know that at least once I had thought about the incongruity of the term though. Continue reading →