Does your mind ever seize upon something ordinary and suddenly make it seem strange and beautiful?
I was just pondering the name 'Margaret', which has quite dowdy connotations these days. It's a name I associate with older and especially conservative women – fuck you Margaret Thatcher
a younger person with the name is more likely to go by a diminutive or derivation of it, such as Meg, Maggie, Molly, Peggy, Daisy, Maisie or Margot
Even the Latin name Margarita and the French name Marguerite seem more popular than the English derivative
The name means 'pearl' and came into the Romance languages from Greek 'margaritari' – μαργαριτάρι – which was a Persian loanword and ultimately came from the Sogdian language
Sogdian is a Middle Iranian language from the region whose capital is Samarqand – the famous Silk Road trading city that was also the hub of the Timurid Renaissance of Islamic scholarship. It was a Central Asian lingua franca of governance, trade and learning
Importantly, Sogdia is a landlocked region. So to me it seems they would have got the word for 'pearl' from someone else who traded pearls to them
But even despite all this #etymology, the actual English name Margaret looks cool and exotic to me now in an underrated way
like, the ending -aret with the single t really HITS for me
I wonder if these words that came into English with one t but into the Romance languages with two ts reflect the English custom of just lopping off a Latin suffix
I know I've seen other English words that do that, but of course none of them come to mind right now