2398: pomegranate Jul 13, 2021
Pomegranate is pretty clearly involving the root of the French 'pomme' (Latin 'pomum') meaning 'apple' or more accurately 'fruit' but it is less clear about the second element. Some say this is from the Latin 'granatum' meaning 'seeds' from the root of *gre-no- (grain) but this is not the only theory. Part of the difficulty there is that the word used to be 'poumgarnet' and the '-gra-' came to be through metathesis, so to go on this etymology which does certainly have some historic backing would require two rounds of metathesis on the same term. Still, names including the Latin 'mālum grānātum' (seeded apple) and mālum Punicum (Punic apple) are attested historically, so this may just be so. The scientific name is Punica granatum, in line somewhat with the Roman naming.
2397: Naming of the First World War Jul 12, 2012
The First World War may have sounded a pessimistic name for those who would not predict a second, but in 1920 there was a book named as such. In fact, while many at the time called it The Great War, this had previously referred to the Napoleonic War, and realizing this nature of forgetting and renaming wars, The First World War, 1914-1918 by Charles à Court Repington was titled for people of future generations.
2396: Countries without Long-Form Names Jul 11, 2021
Most countries have an official long-form name such as 'Venezuela' and 'The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela', 'Micronesia' to the 'Federated States of Micronesia', and 'Luxembourg' to 'Grand Duchy of Luxembourg'. Indeed, countries like Japan, Hungary, Tuvalu, and Ireland are some of the few countries with no distinctions between common names and official names, sort of. In the case of Japan, the official name is Nippon, even in English, but this is very rarely used and since it is simply the endonym rather than an expanded name this is not considered to be long-form. Conversely, Ireland is often referred to as the Republic of Ireland, especially to disambiguate this with Northern Ireland or the island as a whole, despite the fact that this is not officially used by the country itself. Some others like Hungary used to have official long-forms but removed them, as in that case in 2012.
2395: Odd Soviet Names Jul 10, 2021
Russian names, especially during the Soviet era can reflect a lot about the culture. For instance, электростанция (elektrostantsiya) and индустриализация (industrializatsiya) meaning 'power-station' and 'industrialization' respectively were (and to a lesser extent still are) girls' names. Others existed like 'Vilen' as an acronym of (V)ladimir (I)lyich (Len)in. Much of the time this was to show one's dedication to the Communist Party, and many last names in this style were taken as well.
2394: Verrazzano & Verrazano Jul 9, 2021
Plenty of things around New York are named for Giovanni da Verrazzano. Many of these if not all however are mispelt. It is not entirely clear as to how things ended up this way, but major construction projects such as the Verrazano Bridge are only spelt with one Z. Likewise, the Maryland's Verrazano Bridge has this same error.
2393: whale Jul 8, 2021
The word 'whale' has its origins even in idioms and phrases of Old English, the concept used to be more generic. First off, the Old English could refer to a walrus, which is a compound once meaning 'whale-horse' in Dutch, or 'horschwæl' in Old English. This word was also part of many kennings like 'hron-rād' ('whale-road'). Likewise, this root historically just referred to any large sea-animal, such as the Latin 'squalus' denoting anything big in the sea. Indeed this idea carried on into modern phrases like 'whale of a time' which just means 'big; grand'.
2392: New Angoulême Jul 7, 2021
Old New York was once New Amsterdam, but before then even it was known as New Angoulême. While officially taken by a French voyage, the man who commanded the ship was Italian. Still, he wished to curry favor with the French king and Giovanni da Verrazzano named it after the place the king was born. In fact, Francis I was from the house of Valois, but of those there were 3 dynasties: the House of Valois, Valois-Orléans, Valois-Angoulême, the latter of which King, Francis I was the first monarch.
2391: ululate, howl, & owl Jul 6, 2021
There are umpteen synonyms out there with formal-informal distinctions, like the words 'ask' and 'question' or even 'interrogate', but in the case of 'howling' and 'ululation', these are distant cognates. Both of these are traced back to the Proto-Indo-European *u(wa)l- meaning and leading to 'wail'. Plenty of words come from this, including 'owl', so called for the screeches it makes. Indeed, a number of languages around Europe have this same pattern of owls and howling being connected etymologically, though of course there are many birds named for their sounds, most obviously perhaps being the cuckoo.
2390: Traboules and Snickelways Jul 5, 2021
While terms for common architectural and city-planning phenomena do not tend toward regionality, there are some exceptions. For instance, the French city of Lyon is famous for what are known as a 'traboule', which literally means like 'crossway' but refers to a city-specific system of passageways and alleys that often cross into private property, and were once used to move silks to the river to be sold when it was given a near monopoly on the French silk trade. Likewise, the city of York is famous for its so-called 'snickelways', a term derived for its narrow, winding alleys coined in the 1980's. These are only a couple examples of city-specific terminology, partly because of the unique way that they sprang into being, but many other cities have similar reasons for their own unique, or at least particular terms.
2390: family Jul 4, 2021
Family is not a choice, and neither is slavery. In Latin, 'familia'—the source of many derivatives in languages around the world—most specifically referred to the domestics of one house or estate, and this would include relatives but also servants. An earlier 'famulus' exists as a word for 'servant' or 'slave'. For the sense of family across generations it was more common in fact to use the word 'domus', which has its own very interesting set of derivatives in English. The English word 'family' also referred to the household staff even into the 16th century, though by the 17th the word came to mean 'parents with their children'. This replaced the Old Enlgish 'hiwscipe' which had a similarly broad meaning as well as 'ham' (as in 'hamlet') leading to the word 'home' but originally meaning 'village'.
2389: Eritrea & Eretria Jul 3, 2021
Eritrea is a country, and Eretria is a Greek city. These are not as connected as one might falsely conclude however, even though the country 'Eritrea' gets its name from Greek, specifically Ἐρυθρὰ Θάλασσα (Erythra Thalassa) meaning 'Red Sea'. This name was given over by the Italians who colonized the land in 1890, but even when it was under the British or later Ethiopian control the name was retained. The nation has a number of different linguistic groups with no official language either from which to take another name. The Greek city is named Ερέτρια from the word ἐρέτης, (erétēs) meaning 'rower', giving the city the name translating as 'city of rowers'.
2388: How the Vitamins got their Names Jul 2, 2021
While the need for vitamins is a basic one, the naming of them is only misleadingly basic. Vitamins A, B, C, D, and E are all named simply in order of their discovery, starting in 1912. After this however, the list skips right to K, which has its name for two reason. On the one hand, mainly this is because it was what was available, though now F-J have all been renamed, either as mere variants of other vitamins—particularly of vitamin B—or were false discoveries. Others have suggested this is from the German word 'koagulation' since it was discovered in Germany and helps with blood coagulation. Even if this is true, it is not as relevant as the first reason though. Other anomalies include a lack of vitamin N, Q, R, or T despite there being vitamins P, S, and U.
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'.