I was stupidly thrilled while reading my e-newsletter from @elcultural to find the word "letraheridos" (more or less "people hurt by letters") to describe what English might call #bibliophiles or #literature lovers—and now I'm wondering if the origins of this newer term have anything to do with #Auden declaring #Yeats was hurt into #poetry ... Wherever it came from, I'm declaring it the best word I've heard in ages.
4.75/5 @thestorygraph for "The Oxford Dictionary of Etymology" Durkin's passion for his subject shines through and lifts the quality of his writing, from beginning
"I would like to thank the dedicatees of this book ("my parents") for tolerating a child’s at times rather obsessive interest in very old documents and even older words."
to end
"like all the best intellectual pursuits, once the bug is caught, it is likely to remain with one for life." #AmReading#ebooks#etymology@bookstodon
TFW a paragraph about #English names in a book on etymology puts a snippet of #German poetry you last read 30+ years ago into your head: "Es war einmal ein lattenzaun mit zwischenraum, hindurchzuschaun" (Bonus points for any who know why the poem always reminds me of Emo Philips😀) #AmReading#etymology#nonfiction#poetry#Deutsch#ebooks#Kobo@bookstodon
"Following" up a bit of paper book reading with some real fun - a whole page on the origin of "procession" from "Borrowed Words: A History of Loanwords in English" #AmReading#ebooks#Linguistics#etymology@bookstodon
Y'all as a second-person plural pronoun is not just “the quintessential Southern pronoun.” A linguist has found uses going back to 1631 in England, hundreds of years before the more recent usages cited by the Oxford English Dictionary.
And its inclusiveness is also gaining new respect, you hear?
"Bharat" is already India's name in most local languages, including Hindi, and is mentioned as a synonym of "India" in the English version of the country's constitution, but hasn't been used in formal international contexts until now.
The name "#India" was already used by the Ancient Greeks more than 2000 years ago, though some in the region associate it more now with the #UK's colonial subjugation of the country in the 1700s-1900s.
At work today, someone noted the word "how" was the odd one out among the typical question words. Who, what, where, when, why all start with W, but how is stuck with just an H.
I couldn't resist mentioning that how used to have a W too. In fact, all these words used to start with hw-.
But the old word "hwo" lost its W long ago, since the W pretty much blended with the O sound that came after it. And this "hwo" would eventually become "how".
The real story behind Black Friday (from 2011) (www.motherjones.com)
web archive link...