1737: liaison Sep 16, 2019

A liaison now means a close meeting of two people, sometimes secretly, but it was originally a cooking term. Still today it can be used to refer to a binding or thickening agent in cooking or baking, often based on eggs, but over time the idea of bringing two ingredients together started to refer more often to people, as is the case today.

As it happens, in linguistics the term refers to when a normally 'silent' letter, such as in French, is pronounced when the following word begins in a vowel, such as the S in 'mes amis' (my friends).

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