Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Today’s One Big Happy, with one of Ruthie’s word confusions:

Collage, collagen: etymological cousins.

From NOAD2:

collage a piece of art made by sticking various different materials such as photographs and pieces of paper or fabric onto a backing. ORIGIN early 20th cent.: from French, literally ‘gluing.’

collagen the main structural protein found in animal connective tissue, yielding gelatin when boiled. ORIGIN mid 19th cent.: from French collagène, from Greek kolla ‘glue’ + French –gène.

This entry was posted on July 7, 2015 at 12:31 am and is filed under Etymology, Linguistics in the comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.