An easy joke, that one there in the title. But have you ever wondered why revolting has two such distinct meanings which let us make the joke in the first place?
Continue readingThe Peasants are Revolting
linguistic evolution
Fowl Play
I came across an interesting mistranslation recently (well, I come across quite a few around Sicily, but you get used to the more ordinary ones after a while). Continue reading
What Do You Call a Male Bimbo?
You’re probably familiar with the term bimbo, a pejorative term for a stupid, vacuous (but attractive) woman. It’s one that seems to be used much more in writing, particularly tabloid journalism, than speaking, but one most people well-acquainted with English will probably know.
And recently, bimbo has been joined by himbo, a vacuous, stupid (but attractive) man. Only fair, of course, that there’s a word for the gander as well as the goose. Though the fact there was no male version of bimbo until it was coined recently is also quite revealing of the structural patriarchialism underlying a lot of languages. Or you could also look at it as being male stupidity being taken for granted so much that there was no need to create a specific term for stupid men. Whatever way you see it though, it’s quite curious that bimbo wasn’t actually always so gender specific. Continue reading
The Short and Curlies
You may want to have a quick look at this old post, about the word hedgehog. before reading this one. The main thing to take from it is that urchin originally referred to hedgehogs. Continue reading
Tyrant
When reading about the history of Sicily, especially the period of Greek colonies here (around the 5th century BC), the tyrant Theron is mentioned quite a lot. He must’ve been a pretty bad egg, you might be thinking, to be called a tyrant, you might think. Well, not necessarily…
Tyrant nowadays has entirely negative connotations in English, usually referring to cruel or despotic absolute rulers, often those who have gained power as a usurper. This has a very direct connection to the Ancient Greek word tyrannos, from which it’s derived, which also generally referred to someone who usurped power. In Ancient Greece though, the term was a neutral one, for a long time at least.
Theron, for example, gained power in Acragas (modern-day Agrigento) in Sicily in 488 BC, a major power during the heyday of Magna Graecia (Greater Greece), a name given by the Romans to the Greek colonies in the south of modern-day Italy in the 5th century BC.
Theron apparently came to power by using public funds allocated for a temple-building project to hire bodyguards. Politics never really changes!
Close-up of the apparent tomb of Theron, near Agrigento
Because he came to power in this way, he earned the title tyrant, but it seems he wasn’t a particularly unpopular ruler. It might seem odd to us to see the word tyrant used in a neutral way, but I guess 2,500 years ago it wasn’t so strange for somone to seize power by force. And as long as you were a just ruler afterwards, people didn’t really mind that much.
Still, over time, the term came to be used in an exclusively negative way. Even by about 100 years after Theron took power, Plato and Aristotle were using the term to refer to cruel and unjust rulers who had usurped their power, and as democracy became more prominent, the negative meaning stuck.
And now of course we only use it in extreme cases for rulers who use corrupt means to gain control, and show disdain for those they’re meant to serve. Can’t think of anyone like that…
Temple
I’ve spent the last two days in Agrigento, a town on the south coast of Sicily, and close to an impressive Ancient Greek temple complex known as the Valley of the Temples. While on my way there, I wondered: why do we call the areas to the side of our forehead temples? Continue reading
Time
I don’t have enough time to finish this project!
What time is it?
I’ve been to France four times.
Three times two is six.
Those four sentences are all pretty simple, aren’t they? They’re the kind of sentences you might use in everyday situations without thinking about them. But look more closely at that word they all have in common: time. Continue reading
English-Language Thoughts 