Do you know where the phrase "lick [someone] into shape" comes from?
It goes back to Pliny the Elder, who wrote in 77 BCE that bear cubs were born shapeless blobs that their mothers then licked into the shape of a bear. The phrase enters English in the 1400s, via translation from French.
I am never not thinking about this! Because we constantly lick each other into the shapes we are.
Our actions matter. Who we surround ourselves with matter.
Near me in Sheffield there is a well-known footpath between the Ecclesall Road area and Harrow called Frog Walk. I, and I think most people, always assumed it was so-named because of its proximity to the Porter Brook river and, therefore, frogs.
However, the real origin of the name is actually far more interesting from a linguistic standpoint.
Medically, it’s a source of digitalin, used to treat heart conditions. Due to the contained cardiac glycosides, all parts must be considered toxic.
“Digitalis” is from Latin “digitus,” meaning “finger,” for its shape.
Folklore has it that foxes wore the flowers as gloves. The name may also come from “folk’s glove,” referring to fairy folk. In various European folklore, it is associated with fairies.
"Throughout his life, Skeat supported the OED by his reviews (today it seems incredible that once not everybody praised Murray’s work) and kept chastising his countrymen for their ignorance and stupidity when it came to philology. He never stopped complaining that people used to offer silly hypotheses of word origins, instead of consulting the greatest authority there was."
Latin super (above) + cilia (eyelashes) gives supercilia (eyebrows).
Supercilia + -osus (full of) gives superciliosus (looking with disdain/raised eyebrows, lit. full of eyebrows).
During the 16th century, English writers borrowed superciliosus from Latin as supercilious. But we had to wait four more centuries for Leonard Nimoy's Spock.
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
I'm no expert at maths in much the same way ostriches are not experts in flying , but something still seems a bit suss about this, from "Word Perfect: Etymological Entertainment For Every Day of the Year" by Susie Dent. Unless, of course, my copy "had the good fortune to fall through a time warp from a hundred years in the future" 😀 #Nonfiction#etymology#language#AmReading#ebooks#Kobo@bookstodon
Why White Feelings Trump Historical Context? ( lemmy.world )