The song “Live and Let Die” came on the radio this morning, and it made me think: is this phrase now better-known than the original phrase (live and let live) that it references?
Live and Let Die
English language
From QWERTY to AZERTY
I left my laptop in to be repaired today, which was a pretty smooth operation until I realised I don’t know the French word for hinges. All this means that I’m currently typing this on an AZERTY keyboard.
Blond on Blonde
You may have noticed yesterday, that I wrote the following, ungainly looking thing:
blond(e)
Why put the E inside parentheses, some of you might have furiously asked? Or perhaps you slammed your fist on the table and angrily wondered why I even bothered including the E at all. Well, as always, I had my reasons, because blond and blonde are in fact two distinct words.
Pretty, Pretty, Pretty Good
Adjective:
(of a person, especially a woman or child) attractive in a delicate way without being truly beautiful.
‘a pretty little girl with an engaging grin’
Adverb:
To a moderately high degree; fairly.
‘he looked pretty fit for his age’
‘it was a pretty bad injury’
Pretty is, well, a pretty interesting word. The definition that immediately comes to mind for you is probably the first one above. What really interests me about this definition is that last part: without being truly beautiful. Pretty is certainly a less powerful word than beautiful. Because of that it, like nice, feels almost like an insult to use it to describe someone. Sure, it’s technically a positive word, but when you’ve got so many other adjectives you can use, calling someone pretty feels like a deliberate choice to not use something more unambiguously complimentary.
What does the Name of your Favourite Coffee Mean?
It seems like only a few years ago, when, as chain coffee shops like Starbucks became popular, every second comedian felt compelled to joke about how coffee shops had so many crazy types of coffee.
Now though, such chains are commonplace, and we’re all quite used to the idea of being able to get a variety of coffees. Have you ever wondered though, what all those names actually mean?
Spitting Image
A quick thought to start your week. If someone looks exactly another person, we can that they’re the spitting image of that person. Why on earth would we use such a disgusting phrase?
Before I looked into it, I thought this might be a simple case of some old Proto-Germanic word sounding like spitting, but having nothing to do with the actual practice.
That’s not the case however, and the original meaning is all about spit! The original phrase was the spit and image of him/her, and referred to the notion that a child looked so like one of their parents that it was though they’d been spat out by them and formed from their spit. This evolved into the spit of…, and then the spitting image of.
So yes, a bit disgusting. But it probably didn’t seem so bad 400 years ago when people were generally dirtier than now. And people used to believe lots of disgusting things, like flies were born from rotting carcasses, or that artificial humans (homunculi) could be created by mixing human sexual material with earth and various filthy substances.
And you could say that the idea of a child being created from its parents’ spit is an example of people having a vague grasp of genetics before we’d really pinned the science down.
Pretty impressive, but still, pretty disgusting too.
Throwing Shade and Taking Umbrage
English-Language Thoughts 