Archive for the ‘Etymology’ Category
March 19, 2026
An example on the hoof, complete with the libelous myth of gay recruitment:
“These homos are interested in recruiting new members,” Rev. Benjamin Bubar, leader of the fundamentalist Christian Civic League of Maine, told the Bangor Daily News. (“Remembering the Maine Gay Symposium”, link here)
with homo, an abbreviation of the medical-technical term homosexual, the short form derogating gay men — along with such terms as fairy, pansy, fruit, BrE poof(ter), and before some of us homos engaged in reclaiming it, fag(got). I’m comfortable, even proud and defiant, with faggot, but because fairy-boy was the primary verbal abuse directed (inexplicably) at me in childhood, along with (equally inexplicable) accusations that I wanted to be a girl, I’ll never get on good terms with fairy.
Your mileage probably varies. Most people recognize fairy — and homo — as usually intended to be insulting, but open for ironic and playful uses, even full reclamation, as in the Radical Faery movement (for queer liberation, community, and ecological awareness). So, on the homo front, we get a queer-studies colleague of mine, parting from a lunch together with the announcement that he had to get his homo ass back to work. How queer is that?
More to come in this vein.
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Posted in Abbreviation, Clothing, Etymology, Formulaic language, Homosexuality, Insults, Language play, Lexicography, Movies and tv, Proverbs, Puns | 3 Comments »
March 17, 2026
In yesterday’s posting “The breakfast walk”, one notable feature of that walk was what is now the elegant Nobu Hotel Epiphany, which preserves (from the earlier Casa Olga hotel) the 6-story-tall mosaic mural of El Palo Alto, the coast redwood tree for which the city of Palo Alto is named:
(#1) The Casa Olga mural
(#2) The mural on the much-expanded Nobu Hotel Epihany
I remind you that this is a short distance from my house, but has just become part of the urban landscape, taken for granted — as indeed we take for granted the many actual coast redwoods growing companionably on our streets (reaching straight into the sky, towering over a hundred feet, easily hundreds of years old). (There’s one such tree only about 50 feet from my front door.)
And I remind you that the tree in #1 and #2 is not an abstract or imagined coast redwood, but a specific Sequoia sempervirens — El Palo Alto — that grows in a little urban forest park, alongside the railroad tracks (originally Southern Pacific, now Caltrain) at the border between Palo Alto (in Santa Clara County) and Menlo Park (in San Mateo County), only abut 7 blocks from my house.
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Posted in Etymology, Language and plants, Logos, Mascots, Names, Palo Alto, Signs and symbols, Spanish, Stanford | Leave a Comment »
March 9, 2026
On 3/7 (on this blog) I posted “The travails of etymology”, about the sources of some phrasal verbs meaning ‘to die’. Which elicited from Troy Anderson friendly but anxious e-mail on 3/8:
dai s’la (hello friend/cousin, in Miluk),
Your last post on Facebook makes me think you’re thinking you’re about done? I’m sad we haven’t kept the conversation going.
Know I’m here rooting for you.
(The reference to the language Miluk will get clarified eventually, when I tell you more about TA.)
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Posted in Death and dying, Etymology, Etymythology, Humor, Language and religion, Lexicography, Music, My life, Poetry | Leave a Comment »
March 7, 2026
Thoughts inspired by a comment by Robert Coren on my 3/6 posting “Checking out”, in which I responded darkly to the information from a grocery-delivery service that you can:
Add items until your shopper checks out
by understanding the intransitive phrasal verb check out in it not as the intended sense
To complete the procedure required in order to register one’s departure from a location or venue, esp. a hotel, at the end of a stay or visit. Also more generally: to leave, to depart. [OED‘s 1b for check out]
but as OED‘s 4a ‘to die’. RC offered a speculation on the etymology of the mortal sense of a different intransitive phrasal verb with out, peg out:
4a reminds me of a phrase that I encountered in Dorothy Sayers’ The Nine Tailors, where “peg out” is used as a colloquialism for “die”; I assume that (1) it comes from the process of being victorious in a cribbage game (which makes it a rather odd metaphor, actually), and (2) it was standard usage among some portion of the British population in the early 20th century.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Etymology, Etymythology, Humor, Movies and tv, Toys and games | 7 Comments »
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 »
