Language Log

[This is a guest post by Gábor Parti]

This morning at the Greek stand of the farmers market, I bought spanakopita ("spinach pie") and one other item with the "spanako-" root, which also had spinach as a main ingredient.  The resemblance to English "spinach", plus the fact that it was obviously not one of those ubiquitous wrinkled leafy green vegetables related to cabbage, kale, collard, etc., got me interested in what its etymology was.

Just quickly checking a few easily accessible sources, some seemingly contradictory aspects of the common understanding of the etymology of "spinach" started to bother me:

From Middle English spinach, from Anglo-Norman spinache, from Old French espinoche, from Old Occitan espinarc, from Arabic إِسْفَانَاخ (ʔisfānāḵ), from Classical Persian اسپناخ (ispanāx, ispināx).

Wiktionary

Feargus O'Sullivan. "Trump’s Gilded Design Style May Be Gaudy. But Don’t Call it ‘Rococo.’", Bloomberg 7/3/2025:

The US president’s taste for gilded decor is often dismissed with comparisons to an ornate European style of the 18th century. But the real Rococo deserves a second look.

When President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January, he wasted little time redecorating. The design style of his opulent Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, was ported to the Oval Office: Gilded figurines, plump cherubs and decorative appliques were liberally applied to walls and other surfaces in the presidential workspace.

As with the tariffs and travel bans, the renovations of the second term have been more aggressive than those seen during the first. One term used repeatedly to describe this excess of gilt and glitter is Rococo — an elaborate design style associated with pre-revolutionary France. In the New York Times, Emily Keegin called the new Oval Office a “gilded rococo hellscape,” while Kate Wagner of the blog McMansion Hell dubbed the presidential look “Regional Car Dealership Rococo.” The R word — sometimes uppercased, sometimes not — has also been invoked to describe Trumpian decor in the Washington Post, the LA Times and Vanity Fair.

For a linguistic angle on the stylistic issues, see "Elaborate interiours and plain language", 6/3/2016, along with the links therein.

[first draft written June 9-10, 2025 in Bemidji, Minnesota, where the famous giant statues of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox stand next to beautiful Lake Bemidji*]

During my peregrinations in upper midwest USA, I noticed a proliferation of place names beginning with "mi-".  Because there are 10,000 big and little glacial lakes up here, I suspected that "mi-" might be a prefix signifying "water").  I had come to Minneapolis to explore the headwaters of the Mississippi in northern Minnesota.  That alone was enough of an emphatic prompt to set me off on a linguistic "mi-" quest.

My main intention on this trip is to follow the Mississippi from Lake Itasca, whence it emerges as a small stream about ten feet wide you can walk across on a line of stones in northern Minnesota, to where it debouches into the Gulf in the south.  European-American settlers named the Mighty Mississippi after the Ojibwe word ᒥᓯ-ᓰᐱ misi-ziibi ("great river"). (source)  Misi zipi is the French rendering of the Anishinaabe (Ojibwe or Algonquin) name for the river. (source) 

So I had one strike against me on the first "mi".

For English speakers, a mind-boggling letter to the editor on linguistic gender from the Times Literary Supplement (3/9/25):

Masculine and feminine

In Cristina Rivera Garza’s Death Takes Me, reviewed by Lucy Popescu (In Brief, April 18), a character points out that “in Spanish, the word victim, or victima, is always feminine”. This is evidently true, but it would be wrong to draw conclusions regarding any inherently gendered notions of victimhood from this fact; the Spanish word for person (la persona) is also feminine, but it does not therefore follow that persons are essentially female.

On March 27, horrificgoth posted on tumblr

(crawls on all fours with blood drenched on me) I have to do arts and crafts

resulting in 56,876 notes so far. One of them, posted Saturday 5/10 by Seebs, was

i’m more mad about this than i might otherwise be because someone pointed out the “-ench” suffix in English a while back:

drink -> drench

cling -> clench

we used to have a form for “to cause-to” on verbs. and yes, there was apparently a q verb for fire-going-out that led to “quench”.

sadly, people refuse to acknowledge my other example:

wink -> wench

I recall that when I began learning Mandarin, one of the things (!) that troubled me greatly was why the word for "thing" was written with the characters for "east" and "west":  dōngxi 東西.  My classmates came up with all sorts of outlandish, speculative explanations for the supposed etymology.  All along, I suspected that the meaning "thing" for the disyllabic word dōngxi 東西 was not derived from the characters used to write it but was the phonetic reflection of a borrowing or the representation of some colloquial, topolectal term.

From Mok Ling:

A friend of mine, Lucy, is in a Mandarin learning group. She told me about the bizarre etymology she was taught for the word dōngxi 東西. Apparently, 東西 being used to mean "thing, item" is based on the conception of the Five Phases (wǔxíng 五行 [VHM:  formerly translated as Five Agents or Five Elements, which brings out the correspondences with the Four Elements of Western classical thought, also in the metaphysics of Indian, Tibetan, and other cultures]): East is represented by the element of Wood (木) and West is represented by the element of Metal (金). Objects are made of metal and wood, therefore "east-west" became a shorthand "thing" — obviously pretty ridiculous.

The words that leap to mind are pustakālaya पुस्तकालय (pustak पुस्तक ["book"] + ālaya आलय ["place"]) and granthālaya ग्रन्थालय (granth ग्रंथ ["text"] + ālaya आलय ["place"]).  Those are simple and straightforward.

There were several other Sanskrit words for library I used to know, such as vidyākośasamāśraya विद्याकोशसमाश्रय* that included the component vidya ("knowledge"), but they were more subtle and complicated, so they were harder for me to recall.

*knowledge treasury coming together (for support or shelter)

I've been saying "Erin go Bragh" my whole life and knew that it meant roughly "Ireland Forever!".

Someone complained in an inappropriate and non sequiturish place that AIO (Artificial Intelligence Overview) did not definitively solve the difficult problem of the seeming non-Sinitic etymology of Japanese waka 若 ("young; youth") that he posed to it.

Cf. Wiktionary:

Japanese

Noun

若(わか) • (waka) 

1. 1. "my lord" (towards a young master or a young heir)

I've lost a considerable amount of sleep over these two words, not just because they both have nine letters and look almost the same, differing only by a single consonant, but even more so because, while they both signify something bad or undesirable about the way situations unfold or how people behave toward others, they imply the opposite in the manner these odious actions are carried out, but have no obvious clues about their usage.

I encouraged Nathan Hopson to see the last sentence of the second comment here, "Ramen Lo Mein lou1 min6" (1/9/25), which reads:  "We need Nathan Hopson / other Japanese lexicologists…".

Nathan replied with this guest post:

"Oxford English Dictionary adds seven new Korean words including ‘dalgona’ and ‘tteokbokki’:  This is the first time since September 2021 that the dictionary has added new Korean words"
Shahana Yasmin, The Independent (1/7/25)

Korean has accepted many English words into its vocabulary, including "hotdog" (except in the north, where it is forbidden).  Now, with Korean culture and economy booming globally, it is not surprising that Korean language will be spreading too.

…According to the OED’s website on Tuesday, the words “noraebang,” “hyung,” “jjigae,” “tteokbokki” and “pansori” were also added in the December update.

…Dalgona, which entered the pop culture lexicon with the release of Netflix’s hit show Squid Game in 2021, is defined as a “Korean confection made by adding baking soda to melted sugar, typically sold by street vendors in the form of a flat disc with a simple shape such as a heart, star, etc., carved on its surface”.