2387: son of a gun Jul 1, 2021
The phrase 'son of a gun' is often thought to be a euphemistic replacement for another worse insult, but this is not so true. While its precise origins are certainly a matter of some dispute, it seems to have originated somewhere around the mid- to late-18th century as military slang. The earliest uses of this phrase was in reference to a military brat, though other, less reliable theories have emerged about its use for those infants born on the ships of the Royal Navy, or even earlier.
2386: Chinese Morphology Jun 30, 2021
To say that Chinese is morphologically simple is an understatement. There is no verb tense, no voice (e.g. active; passive), and has no form of pluralization. All of these functions which in other languages are typically carried out through morphology are instead reliant on particles which indicates things like aspect and mood. This concept is not so foreign to English, which itself has no future tense, and relies on particles too.
2385: Behind, Beside, & Before Jun 29, 2021
English has the words 'behind' and 'beside' and 'before', with the Old English 'bi-' (be-) indicating proximity—hence the derivative word 'by'—and yet there are still some disputes whether 'behind' and its earlier forms even existed before 'hind', or whether 'hind' was actually developed by backformation. However, there are a number of cognate words like the Old Norse hindr (Old English 'hinder') meaning 'obstacle; opposition', and the Latin 'contra' ('against') which do relate to physiological proximity. Other Germanic cognates to 'hind' have a meaning of something being distant and a few too do also mean 'at the back', but also 'at the side'. The evidence in fact is not as definitive as one might want necessarily.
2384: felon Jun 28, 2021
While no one should want to be called a felon, it used to have certain additional bad connotations in the past. In Old French 'felon' could mean any sort of 'evil-doer' both in a legal sense including treachery or oath-breaking, but also generally being a scoundrel in the traditional sense. One theory as to where it originates beyond that point is with the Frankish '*fillo' meaning 'scourge', or the Latin fel (poison) while others point to the Latin 'fellare' meaning 'to suck'. Beyond this, it is especially unclear if this was of Romantic or Germanic origins.
2383: Inflected Prepositions Jun 27, 2021
Mostly, inflection is thought of as relating to nouns or adjectives, but this process can also be applied to prepositions in certain languages such as those in the Celtic or Semitic families. For instance, the Welsh word meaning 'to him' is 'iddo', which broken down from 'i-' (to) with a special ending, whereas saying *i fe (to + him) would be ungrammatical. These types of words wherein a preposition is modified with person and case are found in very few languages but are seen in Hebrew and Arabic as well where a modified form derived of the personal pronoun can be added to a preposition. A handful of exceptional cases are found such as with Portuguese.
2382: Rivieras Jun 26, 2021
All around the world one can find Rivieras, although only two can be called 'the Riviera' without any qualification: the Italian and French Rivieras. That said, from Egypt, Massachusetts, Guangdong (China), and Mexico—the rest primarily found around Southern Europe—the definition is not particularly precise. In Italian this word just means 'coastline' but in practical use this word tends to relate to any stretch of long, sunny coastal areas that have come to be tourist hotspots. Even some of the areas listed above called 'rivieras' can stretch that loose definition a bit, and there is surely a bias of giving the title to European areas.
2381: camp Jun 25, 2021
The word 'camp' relating to an open field for lodging is not so surprisingly the same as would be found with 'campus', but neither of these have the explicitly militaristic use that was once seen. While French for instance also has the word 'champ' (field), the root in Latin and then Old English had the sense of "contest; battle" hence phrases like 'camp-fever'. This is also related to the Old High German 'hamf' (paralyzed; maimed). Even in the 19th century, when the word 'camp' had moved on from militaristic senses, it took on religious ones as in 'followers of a doctrine', a sense still seen in reference to ideological battle, including secular academic ones. The sense of 'camp' as a hobby or sporting activity was developed from its use for military but it by a historical framework relatively new.
2380: Kempt: a Word Created from Itself Jun 24, 2021
The word 'kempt' meaning 'neat' it's own word, and while that sounds like a truism, it is special insofar as it was developed twice, in a sense. The more popular 'unkempt' is far more popular, so much so that even though it is just a derivative of the (by definition) older 'kempt', the affirmative form fell out of favor. This is not so rare exactly, with other words that only have a negative form through historical disuse such as 'nonsensical', but this was eventually it was brought back through a process known as 'backformation', when a word is created by the removal of an affix, such as 'butle' from 'butler'.
2379: Variations in the 7 Deadly Sins Jun 23, 2021
The 7 deadly sins (a.k.a. capital vices) are an aspect fo Christian theology, are not found in the Bible and are thus subject to a certain amount of flexibility. For instance, nowadays these would usually be listed as pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, and gluttony but throughout history this had been slightly different. Originally it began with the Ancient Greeks anyway, but even into the Middle Ages this list included 'acedia' (spiritual neglect), vainglory (vanity; boasting, etc.) and tristitia (sorrow; despair). Different theologians from the 4th century onwards would be known to have their own lists with slight variations like this.
2378: Bill vs Beak Jun 22, 2021
Birds have beaks, but some beaks are bills, and while the term 'bill' is now the more restricted term of those two, historically it was the general term with 'beak' only referring to the sharpened bills of birds of prey. In part from that historical confusion, and simply the breadth of variety in which these of rostra are found, there is not much of a practical distinction, and while some are conventional such as ducks having bills and hawks having beaks, other birds may be found described with either nearly synonymously or as a subjective judgment on the shape of the rostrum.
2377: moustache, mandible, & kemp Jun 21, 2021
The word 'mustache' (or 'moustache') has been the word for the hair above the upper-lip since the 16th century, from French but ultimately the Ancient Greek μύσταξ (mústax) meaning 'upper lip'. This in turn is from the root *mendʰ- (to chew) thereby connecting this word to 'mandible': an animal's jaw bone, as well as the French 'manger' (to eat). Before this, English used the word 'kemp'—itself related to 'chin' and more surprisingly, 'camp'. In Middle English, 'kempe' referred to coarse hairs but is not related to other words like 'comb' or 'unkempt'.
2376: boot-camp Jun 20, 2021
The phrase 'boot-camp' can refer to any intense, introductory training course, especially in military contexts. This should come as no surprise therefore that this originated as military slang in the 1940's with the 'boot' in question itself being slang for a new recruit. In particular this was naval slang, and can be attested as far back as the Spanish-American War, with the naval uniform not consisting of boots per se, but of leggings.
2375: Some Country Domain Extensions Jun 19, 2021
Everyone knows .com or .org, but every nation and some territories will have their own domain extensions, some of which do not make sense at first glance. Often this is just from the native language as with Germany's .de (Deutschland), but in the case of South Africa's .za, this is from 'Zuid-Afrika' though now in Afrikaans it is 'Suid-Afrika'. Then there are even more anomalous seeming cases like Western Sahara's .eh. This is actually from Spanish 'Español Sahara' (Spanish Sahara) despite that political period ending in 1975. The H being taken of saHara since Spain itself already uses .es. Others are just from lack of priority, like the French Mayotte having .yt, also sometimes used by YouTube.
2374: nachos Jun 18, 2021
There's an old joke:
What do you call cheese that doesn't belong to you?
Nacho cheese. (This really only works if you say it out loud...)
For Ignacio Anaya however, this would be false. Nachos were actually named after a specific person, Ignacio Anaya, a Mexican restaurateur who owned Nacho's Restaurant and named the dish after himself too. Nacho happens to be a fairly common nicknamed form of the Spanish name Ignacio. This was originally the Latin 'Ignatius', famed for the saint Ignatius of Antioch, with Ignatius technically being a name in English but far less common than its Spanish equivalent.
2373: Biblical Loan Words Jun 17, 2021
Over the years, a number of collections have been arranged of word in Biblical Hebrew that are from other sources, including non-Semitic ones. Of course, some of these will be obvious, such as פרעה ('pharaoh') from Ancient Egyptian probably or קוף (qof) meaning 'monkey' from either Tamil or Sanskrit, considering that these concepts would not be native. Considering also the timespan of Bible, some of these sources will be found later historically after centuries of contact with other civilizations in the Middle East and around the Mediterranean. However, even in the Writings (כתובים) which has the greatest percentage, even a inclusive estimate would put total loan words from any language at less than 2% of all vocabulary.
2372: South Arabian Languages Jun 16, 2021
South Arabian languages, mainly confined to Oman, Yemen (including Soqotri) along with Kuwait. These were once thought to be descendents of Old South Arabian—a collection of four Yemenite languages—but were later reclassified as West Semitic along with Arabic, Hebrew, and Ethiopian Semitic languages: basically any living Semitic language. Still, these diverged from other Semitic languages early, and are closer related to Ethiopian Semitic languages rather than Arabic, though these are far from mutually intelligible. These languages (Bathari, Harsusi, Hobyót, Mehri–Soqotri, Shehri) are known for having certain archaic features, especially when it comes to phonology, lost in other Semitic languages.
2371: mortimer Jun 15, 2021
The surname and later first name 'Mortimer' (hence 'Morty') is originally French for 'dead sea'. This habitational surname however is subject to a folk etymology that this comes from the time when a French speaking class ruled over the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (1099–1291) as one of the crusader states. The Dead Sea at the end of the Jordan River is certainly more famous, but not the dead sea in question, which is actually Mortemer, Seine-Maritime, Normandy, in France. This was the site of the Battle of Mortemer in 1054 fought in this area known for its stagnant water.
2370: Cakes & Biscuits: Legal Classification Jun 14, 2021
Cakes and biscuits might sound like sweet and easy-going treat, but there is a legal and effectively molecular distinction drawn between these in the UK which has led to actual court hearings. Particularly, the Jaffa Cake was subject to this dispute because the two classes of food are taxed differently, and Jaffa Cakes had to be proven to be cakes to avoid a tax specifically on chocolate-covered biscuits. The government tried to base its case on how it was produced like a biscuit, but as had been established in a previous case cakes harden when stale, and biscuits become limp when stale. Since Jaffa Cakes are tall, spongey, and will lose moisture when stale, these were legally proven to be cakes.
For more legal food classification click here.
2369: Abessive Case Jun 13, 2021
Finnish is known for its many grammatical cases: an amount that would put Latin to shame. Still, not all of these are as common as others, such as the abbessive case, a.k.a. caritive or privative case. This expresses a lack of something, and would be roughly comparable to the English '-less', for instance in:
raha (money)
rahatta (without money)
but this is increasingly being replaced with other words like 'ilman' meaning 'without' and is already fairly rare to find in normal speech, though still used to some extent in writing. Hungarian also has suffixes and postpositions for this purpose, but the postposition is not considered a suffix and won't have vowel harmony. Other languages, even related languages like Estonian and many Turkic languages use this case fairly productively, so it's not disappearing universally by any means.
2368: Sir Isaac Newton's Anti-Counterfeit Technique Jun 12, 2021
In the Middle Ages and even into the 17th century, coin clipping (also including shaving) wherein some amount of the money is removed. One way devised as an anti-counterfeit measure by Sir Isaac Newton in 1696 when he was Warden of the Royal Mint was to use grooves on the edge such that shaving and clipping would be easier spotted. One phrase inscribed on these coins after this was DECUS ET TUTAMEN meaning "an ornament and a safeguard". This is actually a phrase from Virgil's Aeneid and was printed on British coins for many hundreds of years.
