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
Apologies for not posting yesterday: it was a pretty hectic day, and I just didn’t have the time or energy to write anything worthwhile. Today’s a little better though, so I’ve got just a brief thought for today.
You may have seen images posted on Facebook about the inexplicability of the word pineapple, especially compared with its counterparts in other languages. If not, here’s an example: Continue reading
I hope you’ve had a nice, relaxing Sunday. Mine was quite nice, and I while reflecting on it just now I was struck by the variety of interesting words involved in my day.
I took my little old Ford Fiesta to a lovely town in County Clare called Killaloe. There I was going to have a panini in a café before deciding on a steak sandwich instead. I then did some kayaking on the River Shannon and on Lough Derg Continue reading
If you find yourself reading a 19th- or early 20th-century British novel, there’s a chance you’ll come across this word. And like me, there’s a chance you’ll make two incorrect assumptions about it. Continue reading
Slang.
An important word for any language learner to be aware of: no matter how well someone learns a language in an academic context, it’s crucial to be exposed to slang in order to get a sense of how a language is really used by native speakers.
So I was interested recently when I came across someone proudly proclaiming that they knew that the word slang was actually a kind of portmanteau, meaning Short Language. I had my doubts. It simply felt too modern. I was sure that the word had existed for quite a long time, and that forming a word in such a way wouldn’t have been done before recent times. In fact, we tend not to make words in that fashion very often in English: combining the opening letters of the words of a definition of a word. It just seems too neat, too self-consciously “clever.”
So I investigated and my doubts were proven to be well-founded. Like with a lot of words, the origin is unclear, and it’s derived form words with similar words which evolved gradually over time, probably from old Nordic words.
So the next time you hear sometime tell you about an English-language fact that seems too good to be true, it probably is so.
It’s a pretty common cliché by now that Greenland is actually very icy, and Iceland is… well, not green all the time, but certainly is some of the time in some areas, and definitely isn’t always icy!
So why the apparently contradictory names then? Continue reading
To celebrate the historic occasion of Wales playing tonight in the semi-finals of their first ever European Championship, I want to write something short about English words of Welsh origin. Short, because there aren’t that many! I think this is largely because Welsh both looks and sounds so different from English that it’s different for Welsh words to enter the English language. But there are a few, such as… Continue reading
English-Language Thoughts 