It was St. Patrick’s Day yesterday (two days ago, at least, by the time you get to read this), so I suppose it’s as good a time as any to look at a few of the words that have come from the Irish language, though I’ve looked at some before.
Score is another of those very common words that have a surprising number of different uses. The most obvious use is as a verb in sport: you can score a goal or a point, for example. Of course it can also be a noun in terms of sport, such as in What’s the score? Less frequently though, we also encounter score to refer to the music from a film or television programme, and as verb meaning to cut or scratch a line on a surface. And a score can mean twenty. Despite all these different meanings though, each use of the word actually shares the same origin.
Another day, another Trump tweet, another nugget of stupidity. As if the Space Force Saturday-morning cartoon wasn’t enough, he then misspelled Marine Corps as Marine Core. At least though, it’s a somewhat understandable misspelling, the words sound the same, and in meaning the words corps and core are similar in a way.
No political commentary needed, I think: space force says it all, doesn’t it? (unless you’re reading this in the future, in which case this is what I’m talking about)
I really feel like people should say this to me more often, because I do like to explain things, and that can come across as very patronizing! The curious thing about the verb to patronize by the way, is that, like many English words, it can have more than one meaning.
It’s pretty common to refer to the United States of America as simply America, or anyone or anything from the country as American. This however, can be somewhat controversial.
I had a really great idea today, at about 08.00am, while I was half asleep. I’ve no idea now what it was, just a vague sense that it was about some words with different meanings that have a shared etymology. Whatever it was, it was interesting (to me), but it’s gone now.
English-Language Thoughts 