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.
You may never have thought much about this term. It probably seems fairly logical to you. It’s the name your mother had when she was a younger woman, before she was married, and maiden is an old word for a young woman, isn’t it? Yes, but as always, there’s a little more to it than that.
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.
Hedgehogs are cute, aren’t they? With their little spines, and their noses, and their pink bellies when they’re being subjected to the 15th take of a video their owner’s making of them having a bath in the hopes it goes viral.
I’ll be driving to Cologne in the morning, so I may not get much writing done over the weekend.
Cologne of course, is a city in western Germany.
Cologne though, as in cologne with a lower-case C when it’s not at the start of a sentence, is something a man sprays on himself to smell nice.
The reason we use the name for both is pretty straightforward.
I think about words quite a lot (you may not be surprised). I had an interesting example of this last night.
Stokers, that’s what. Let me explain…
English-Language Thoughts 