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.
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.
A little while ago, I briefly mentioned the word currency. That’s got me thinking about the names we have for currencies: where do they come from?
This phrase, meaning to die or stop working, is probably a lot older than you think. A famous variation on the line is in the King James translation of the Bible from 1611:
Recall is an interesting word by virtue of how simple its etymology is.
English-Language Thoughts 