After writing about the term bohemian recently, I realisd that there are a few other cases in English of adjectives relating to certain regions having a particular meaning. Continue reading
The Corinthian Spirit
Ancient Greece
What Does Thanos Mean?
About a week or so ago, when Avengers: Infinity War was released, I thought, I wonder if there’s any interesting points related to language raised by the Avengers and their ancillary characters? If you clicked on that link in the first line of the paragraph, or read this post inspired by Black Panther, you can see that these films often give me a lot to think about.
The Gym
Some of you might go to the gym regularly, to keep fit. Good for you, if you do. You might know that gym is short for gymnasium, which would be quite a long word to say all the time, so the abbreviation makes sense.
Astronomy and Astrology
You may already know the difference between these two words, but I think that they can be easily confused, so it’s useful to make a distinction. To put it most simply: astronomy is real, and astrology isn’t.
Sautéd
Do you ever see pretentious French terms on menus and wish you knew what they meant without having to look up their meaning? Perhaps you choose a dish in a restaurant which includes sautéd greens, but you have no idea what they exactly are. Well, let me help you with this one at least. And talk about Ancient Greek philosophers and heraldry too, naturally.
The Fates and The Weird Sisters
A little more Greek mythology for you.
The other day, I wrote about the Furies, and as usual I initially confused them a little with the Fates.
Colon
While writing about military ranks last week, I wondered if the word colony, which I’d touched on briefly the week before, was related to the word column, from whose Italian translation the word colonel comes from.
My mind then thought of other words, like colony and colon: maybe they could be related too. Colony, maybe that comes from the Latin for column, columna, because it originally referred to a garrison town, where a column of soldiers were stationed. That sounds plausible, doesn’t it?
