Would you like tea? You would? Great! But please, take a seat, because this is going to get complicated.
What’s for Tea?
history
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.
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
Riding the Gravy Train
Did you ever wonder where this odd expression comes from? Why would gravy be associated with having an easy time of it? And where does the train fit into it?
He/She/It: They all Float Down Here
I saw IT last week, only it was actually Ça, considering I saw it in a cinema in Liège. English-language films are generally dubbed here, but as it was a somewhat arty cinema, they were proud to offer the VO (version originale) with French and Dutch subtitles. Having two sets of subtitles taking up space on the screen is quite distracting, but it’s an interesting opportunity to compare English, French, and Dutch at the same time.
Watching a film with subtitles in a language you know is always a little odd, as they never translate things exactly, largely because such a thing is basically impossible. Even so, there are always one or two choices the subtitler makes which boggle the mind. I don’t recall anything like that in this case, but there was one necessary difference in translation that intrigued me.
The Etymology of Instagram
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 