Writing in a recent post about telling the time got me thinking about the words analogue and digital.
They’re two words that can be used in many different contexts, and I can safely say that I have a general sense of their meaning. Giving each a precise definition, however, is not always so easy.
While writing about military ranks last week, I wondered if the word colony, which I’d touched on briefly the week before, was related to the word column, from whose Italian translation the word colonel comes from.
My mind then thought of other words, like colony and colon: maybe they could be related too. Colony, maybe that comes from the Latin for column, columna, because it originally referred to a garrison town, where a column of soldiers were stationed. That sounds plausible, doesn’t it?
Good question!
Both are correct, regardless of whether you’re speaking British or American English. If that’s all you wanted to know, you can now go about enjoying your Sunday. But if you want to know how goats, Greek, a sign of the Zodiac, and stuffed animals fit into the equation, then please, read on.
While watching the news yesterday, I was suddenly struck with an epiphany about the etymology of the word parliament.
It’s probably pretty well-known that gasoline and petrol are the same thing, being the American- and British-English terms respectively for the same fuel.
It’s not unusual for their to be such marked differences between the words for the same thing in both varieties of English. But I’ve always been curious as to why the words are so different, especially considering that petrol has a fairly logical etymology.
While writing about social media yesterday, a thought occurred: what’s the etymology of the name Instagram? The Insta- part seemed pretty obvious, but I was curious about the –gram part. Luckily, when you want to find out about the etymology of the names of social media, you don’t have to do too much digging…
English-Language Thoughts 