I think I use this expression a lot. I notice, as I’m writing, which phrases I tend to use more often than others. It’s not necessarily such a bad thing: we can’t use every word in the language, and our use of certain words and expressions is what gives us our own style.
A pretty straightforward question generally, but one with a surprisingly complex range of possible answers.
Over breakfast today, thinking about what to write today, I noticed this article on the BBC website:
I had another of those putting-two-and-two-together moments today. I was trying to elicit the word second from a student. This was in the context of saying a date. This is often quite tricky for French speakers. In French you refer to a date as, for example, le vingt decembre (today’s date). If you were to literally translate this into English, it would be the twenty December, as opposed to the twentieth of December. French speakers often therefore take a while to get used to adding the the and of, and using the ordinal form of the number.
A duck is an aquatic animal, found in freshwater environments around the world.
I probably haven’t blown your mind by telling you that. Nor, I’m sure, will I do so by telling you that to duck is a verb meaning to quickly dip your head. I may, however, surprise you slightly by telling you which word came first.
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.
Read on to find out some of the most amazing facts about the English language! Facts such as…
English-Language Thoughts 