word history

The Country that’s also an Acronym

Niall O'Donnell 5 Comments

An acronym is a word formed whereby each letter represents the first letter(s) of a word. For example:

radar (radio detection and ranging)

laser (light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation)

and… Pakistan. You might not expect the name of a country to be an acronym, but such is the case with Pakistan. While the name means Land of the Pure in Urdu and Persian, it was first coined by Choudhry Rahmat Ali, a Pakistan Movement activist advocating for the creation of an independent state from India’s Muslim-majority regions.

The name was derived from the names of the five northern regions of the British Raj: Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, Sindh, and Baluchistan. The i was added for ease of pronunciation. Sometimes there’s an interesting history behind a name of a place we don’t think too much about, and it can tell us a lot about a country.

Profound

Niall O'Donnell 14 Comments

Being a response to the Daily Prompt: https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/249091/

Profound, and its more common synonym deep, are quite versatile words. There’s the literal sense of the words, measuring how far down something goes. Though we tend to use just deep for that. You’re hardly going to go to the profound end of a swimming pool, perhaps to discuss Proust and the films of Ingmar Bergman.

And then there’s the more abstract meaning of the words, to describe something with an important, valuable intense meaning. Someone can be a very deep person, or a novel can have a very profound meaning. You can feel something, deep down in your heart. We tend to use profound more often in this sense though. You might make a profound statement, or have a profoundly inspiring experience. What makes profound so special that we reserve it for when things are so, well… profound? Continue reading →

“Ok?” “Okay!”

Niall O'Donnell 33 Comments

Ok (or okay) is one of those words (like hiccup/hiccough), wherein I always thought the different spellings could be attributed to one being an older, more formal spelling of the word, and the other a modern abbreviation. I assumed that okay was the original spelling, and ok the modern version, after some clever individual realised that the two letters pronounced one after the other sounded the same as okay. But like hiccough and hiccup, I was wrong to assume so. Continue reading →

Just a Quick Post

Niall O'Donnell 13 Comments

I’m a bit busy again today, so just popping my head in!

Quick is an interesting word: its most obvious meaning is fast, but some may not be aware that it also used to mean alive. When one considers that it came from the old English cwic, meaning alert or animated, one can see how it could branch out from there to mean either fast or alive.

One of the most common phrases that still uses the old meaning of the word is the quick and the dead. It originally comes from the Bible: Continue reading →

What are the Radii of those Cacti? – on Latin Loanwords

Niall O'Donnell 60 Comments

There are a lot of stadia in this city, aren’t there? Do you think there are any octopi in the sea? I’m also curious about the cacti around here: in fact, I’m interested in all the flora and fauna!

You may not find much wrong with the above. Well, hopefully you’ll think “Who on Earth would actually say that!?” But in terms of grammar and vocabulary, it wouldn’t raise too many eyebrows.

What about this though: Continue reading →