Sloths are slow.
Sloth, meaning laziness, is also one of the Seven Deadly Sins in Christianity.
Unsurprisingly enough, the sin came first, and the animal was named after it, because it seems so lazy. They’re not actually lazy of course, just slow. Though some individual sloths probably are lazy, but it’d obviously be unfair to tar them all with the same brush.
It’s a funny word, sloth, and not one we really use beyond these two contexts. Where does it come from?
I was sitting here this morning, not sure what to write, and thinking I might take a little break for today. You know, go outside and enjoy the drizzle. However, I was listening to the song “Lay Lady Lay,” which contains the line You can have your cake and eat it too. And that got me thinking.
Dawn. It means dawn.
It comes, via a few steps, from the Proto-Germanic *austron-, meaning dawn, and also used as the name of a a goddess of fertility and the spring. The link between the spring and the dawn is clear enough: the beginning of life and activity after a period of darkness and inactivity.
When I was young, I was often curious when characters on American TV would occasionally mention cursive. I could never figure out what they meant, and it was mentioned rarely enough that I never really got enough context to figure it out. It also sounded quite strange as it sounded so much like the word curse (and a joke in a classic Simpsons episode is based on this resemblance).
A red-letter day is a day of special significance for some reason or another. Why do we call it a red-letter day?
… and they’ll take a mile. Or, how about…
Give someone a centimetre, and they’ll take a kilometre.
Only one of these is an actual phrase in English, but it doesn’t make reference to the system of measurement in use in every country except three.
It was St. Patrick’s Day yesterday (two days ago, at least, by the time you get to read this), so I suppose it’s as good a time as any to look at a few of the words that have come from the Irish language, though I’ve looked at some before.
English-Language Thoughts 