Among the many discussions of yesterday's inaugural address, one that struck me was Eve Fairbanks' question "Why'd Obama Talk about George Washington?" She observes that "in the last half of the last century or so, George Washington was appropriated by right-wingers as 'their' founder"; and concludes that I thought Obama ended his speech with Washington […]
Don Ringe's guest post "The Linguistic Diversity of Aboriginal Europe" (1/6/2009) led to a series of additional posts in response to readers' questions: "Horse and wheel in the early history of Indo-European", "More on IE wheels and horses", "Inheritance versus lexical borrowing: a case with decisive sound-change evidence", "The linguistic history of horses, gods, and […]
There has been quite a bit of interest in a series of guest posts by Don Ringe on the early linguistic history of Europe. Yesterday, he sent along another installment, which I've posted below on his behalf, as well as an answer to a question from the comments on an earlier post, which I'll post […]
Don Ringe's answer (" Horse and wheel in the early history of Indo-European") to the question that David Marjanović asked about Don's earlier post ("The Linguistic Diversity of Aboriginal Europe") stimulated some further questions, included these from Robert: What was the Anatolian word for wheel? Given its lack of mention above, I'd assume it isn't […]
This morning's serendipity is the history of gas, which turns out to come from chaos, and to have been coined almost 400 years ago by J. B. Van Helmont in association with another word, blas, that never caught on. I was curious about a slang use of gas in Edith Nesbit's The Magic City, to […]
Maybe I'm dense, but I don't see the problem with keeping the term pentathlon for the modified competition in which shooting and running are combined into a single contest. While the modifications result in a reduction from five to four events, five sports continue to be involved. Nor is counting sports rather than events an […]
As reported by Der Spiegel and picked up by the New York Times blog The Lede, two German cartographers have created The Atlas of True Names, which substitutes place names around the world with glosses based on their etymological roots. It's a very clever idea, but in execution it enshrines some questionable notions of "truth."
I was interested in this comment by BeachSaint on Matt Yglesias' post "Duberstein for Obama": Someone should check the seismic activity in the Simi Valley between now and election day because Ronald Reagan must be rolling over in his grave over the antics of the McCain Campaign. I am a registered Republican who has received […]
Several readers have pointed me to Anu Garg's A.Word.A.Day entry for yesterday, obambulate: MEANING: verb tr.: To walk about. ETYMOLOGY: From Latin ob- (towards, against) + ambulare (to walk). Ultimately from the Indo-European root ambhi- (around) that is also the source of ambulance, alley, preamble, and bivouac. The first print citation of the word is […]
Etymology is not destiny, as we keep pointing out here. Thinking that it is is subscribing to the Etymological Fallacy (see here, among many other places). But even synchronically, you can't always trust what you see: derived lexical items are often specialized semantically (as are noun-noun compounds and also combinations of non-predicating adjective plus noun). […]
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I agree with Mark that James Wood's condescending comments about Palin's use of verbage are pure de-haut-en-bushwa. On the other hand, let's not delude ourselves about this item. Palin's verbage is not simply a term for "language" or "wording" that has been happily circulating in vernacular speech since it was first attested 200 years ago, […]
[This is really a comment on a comment on one of our recent posts about the sociopolitics of g-dropping — I've set it up as a separate post because it's too long to fit gracefully in the comments section.]
In 1934, the philologist A. S. C. Ross wrote a review of the 1933 Oxford English Dictionary Supplement (Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 35: 128-132) in which he referred to taboo words as "mumfordish" vocabulary. He used the same word again in the same year in a short note in Transactions of the Philological Society (volume 33, issue […]