Archive for the ‘Etymology’ Category
December 21, 2025
(This posting devolves fairly fast into oral sex between men, so it is, alas, entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest.)
Musical overture: the chorus and verse 2 of the 1960s song “Chapel of Love”:
[chorus]
Goin’ to the chapel
And we’re gonna get married
Goin’ to the chapel
And we’re gonna get married
Gee, I really love you
And we’re gonna get married
Goin’ to the chapel of love
[verse 2]
Bells will ring, the sun will shine,
I’ll be his and he’ll be mine
We’ll love until the end of time
And we’ll never be lonely anymore
Save this thought. In the original, written for a girl group, the narrator is a woman writing about her man. A later version was performed by a guy group; the narrator is a man writing about his woman. Finally, we get performances by Elton John singing to his husband David Furnish (they got a civil partnership in 2005, were married in 2014).
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Posted in Etymology, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Marriage, Music | Leave a Comment »
November 11, 2025
Very briefly noted, this morning’s morning name, the stock insult in French:
parler français comme une vache espagnole, literally ‘to speak French like a Spanish cow’, conveying ‘to speak French badly’
I heard this first from Ann Daingerfield Zwicky and our good friend Benita Bendon Campbell, It’s vivid and silly, and then English like a Spanish cow can be adapted as a critique of someone’s linguistic abilities in French or English or, I assume, any language. Cows being linguistically quite limited, and Spaniards being one of the nationalities French people are inclined to mock (though I would have expected the cow to be Italian, Dutch, or German; or of some exotic despised nationality, like Turkish or Chinese).
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Posted in Etymology, Formulaic language, French, Idioms, Insults, Morning names, Pragmatics, Stock expressions | 2 Comments »
April 5, 2025
Sweet Gee (an alter ego of Gadi Niram’s) wrote on Facebook yesterday about a character in the delightful Hetty Wainthropp Investigates tv show, who I took to be the character played by the adorable Dominic Monaghan, but turned out to be Joe Peluso’s. I wrote:
Ah, I am mollified. I’d completely forgotten JP. Meanwhile, I know that mollify has to do, etymologically, with softening, but I couldn’t help thinking of it as Molly-fy ‘make into a Molly’, presumably by getting into drag.
Two clusters of things here: the Wainthropp show and DM; and the verb mollify and the noun molly / Molly.
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Posted in Actors, Effeminacy, Etymology, Gender and sexuality, Masculinity, Movies and tv, Switzerland and Swiss things | 1 Comment »
November 30, 2024
🐅 🐅 🐅 three tigers for ultimate November and the feast day of St. Andrew the Apostle, patron saint of 🏴 Scotland 🏴 (and several other countries) and of fishermen, fishmongers, rope-makers, textile workers, singers, miners, pregnant women, butchers, farm workers. and more
A follow-up to my 11/28 posting “Today’s surprise etymology”, about the history of Jordan almond, which elicited a nice brief comment by David Preston about Baker’s Chocolate and German Chocolate Cake. Which I now elaborate on.
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Posted in Common & proper, Ethnonyms and demonyms, Etymology, Language and food, Names | 4 Comments »
November 28, 2024
Flashed briefly past me, an ad for Jordan almonds for the holidays, which evoked some memories and also led me to check the etymology in NOAD (which gets this stuff from the OED):
noun jordan almond: a high-quality almond of a variety grown chiefly in southeastern Spain. ORIGIN late Middle English: jordan apparently from French or Spanish jardin ‘garden’. [AZ: though other etymologies have been suggested].
These almonds are commonly sugar-coated:
In which case the name is usually spelled Jordan almond. Jordan almonds are often associated in the popular mind with the Jordan River or the country of Jordan.
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Posted in Etymology, Language and food, My life | 4 Comments »
November 9, 2024
… and, instead of taking the Zzyzx exit, catches a ride with a guy in a SYZYGY car to the end of the road, where one-point perspective takes you (so we are both out in the desert in San Bernardino County CA; and also in the artist’s meta-world, where perspective lines converge in a vanishing point, and that is truly the end of the road). All this in yesterday’s Zippy strip, which is rich in Z, Y, ZY / ZI, and ZYG. plus the occasional antic X:
(#1) Three things: Zzyzx Road; one-point perspective; and the word SYZYGY (the ZYG of which took my mind to the word ZYGOTE; while the concept of syzygy took me to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is a wedding-feast of syzygy — of counterparts, contrasts, conflicts, and oppositions)
And then there’s zig; from NOAD:
noun zig: a sharp change of direction in a zigzag course: he went round and round in zigs and zags.
(which can then be verbed to yield to zig ‘to take a zig’, as in my title)
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Posted in Art, Assonance, Comic conventions, Etymology, Language of sex, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Names, Opposition, Placenames, Semantics, Spelling | 1 Comment »
June 18, 2024
(Tasteless and obscene, in two languages, so not to everyone’s taste)
(#1) A rainbow raised fist, representing proud defiance; image from Redbubble, by designer MAS-S (in Berlin, Germany)
And now the frocio ‘queer, homo, faggot, fairy, queen’ mock-Pope intoning benedico questa frociata ‘I bless this faggotry’ (more literally, ‘this faggoting’) at the 6/15 Pride celebration in Rome, where t-shirts proclaimed “There is never too much frociaggine” — never too much faggotry — as participants enthusiastically embraced every vulgar insult they know (but especially frociaggine), turning them into proud badges of identity and defiance, raising the rainbow fist:
(#2) (photo from the National Catholic Reporter on 6/16/24)
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Posted in Derivation, Etymology, Homosexuality, Italian, Language and religion, Language and sexuality, Morphology, Playful morphology, Rainbow, Signs and symbols, Slang, Taboo language and slurs | 1 Comment »
May 19, 2024
Today’s Sunday Bizarro by Dan Piraro, yet another Bizarro Psychiatrist cartoon, this time with a guy in need of a shrink ‘act of shrinking’, appealing to a shrink ‘headshrinker, psychotherapist’ (so it’s a pun cartoon too):
shrink ‘psychotherapist’ has become so ordinary a term in American English that its connection to the change-of-state verb shrink and the noun headshrinker is no longer salient to many speakers, with the result that the pun has some genuine surprise value (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page)
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Posted in Ambiguity, Comic conventions, Etymology, Linguistics in the comics, Pop culture, Puns | Leave a Comment »
March 23, 2024
An old One Big Happy strip in my comics feed today — posted here on 3/28/14 in “OBH roundup”, but with little comment — in which Ruthie reveals her aide-memoire for the name of a fish her mother sometimes cooks for dinner:
(#1) buncher, crowder? — or flocker, packer, ganger, batcher, schooler? — but actually grouper
At this point, you’re probably thinking that groupers are so called because they travel in schools, that is, in a kind of group. But no; there’s an etymological surprise here.
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Posted in Etymology, Language and animals, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Memory, Portuguese, Semantics of compounds | Leave a Comment »
March 4, 2024
That would be my grandchild, Opal Eleanor Armstrong Zwicky — what a string of names! — who is (decimal) 20 today. For OEAZ on the occasion, this tiny poem:
One score for Opal
Vigesimal 10, the first day of
Her second score —
No longer a teen, now in
Her 20s —
The crowds cheer
Her breakthrough
Now, since I’m irremediably a linguist, a dip into the noun score in games and the measure noun score ’20 years; 2 decades’, which are listed together in dictionaries because, surprisingly, they have the same origin.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Etymology, Holidays, Numbers, Poetry, Signs and symbols | 1 Comment »
