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?
Recently, I’ve noticed, while looking at my blog statistics (it’s very addictive), that someone has been getting here by searching for the word train. Sometimes, it’s quite obvious which posts search terms bring people to. Other times, it’s not so clear. At first I thought that it was bringing people to this post, somewhat related to trains. But then, not really related either. I was curious, so I checked what posts people had read the days someone had searched for train.
It turns out it brought them to this post, about the term gravy train. And then I thought that if they were really looking for some information about the word train, that post would’t really help them at all. And then, I began to think that train is actually quite an interesting word…
Using the phrase in general today, it struck me that the word general is of course a military rank. As I began to think about the meaning of general as a military term, I thought it might be interesting to look at the origins of military ranks.
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.
Quite simply, in the case of the Pacific at least.
While searching for a bathroom in a hospital in Liège this morning (I’m OK, I was donating blood, and I’m writing this on Friday afternoon, so I’m not in Cologne yet), I began to become slightly concerned, as one was hard to find, and I really needed to go. I began to think I’d have to ask someone for directions, and as I do when I know in advance what I’ll need to say in a certain situation, I quickly went through what I’d say in French:
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.
English-Language Thoughts 