Month: July 2015
-
Alágukik
“We two roam by the sea.” Or so I’ve attempted in Aleut. My wife and I have taken to Alaska, the 49th state to join the Union but the 50th state my wife has visited. The dual tense verb alágukik may also mean “we two travel by baidarka,” with a baidarka the iconic Aleutian kayak. For our trip, we’ll just pretend baidarka is “cruise.”…
-
Negotiation
As noted in my last post on deal, the agreement the US, the UK, France, Germany, China, and Russia reached with Iran to limits Iran’s nuclear program took two years of intense negotiations. Certainly, the deal did not come together easily, fittingly enough for the etymology of negotiation. Negotiation English has been negotiating negotiation since the early 1500s, adopting the…
-
Deal
First off, in case you missed the magenta, the Mashed Radish has a new look. Let me know what you think. Special thanks to my brother, Andrew, whom you probably know for the doodles he whips up for my posts, for the new images and input. Now, back to etymology. Last week, after years of negotiation, the US…
-
Pluto
Well over three billion miles from home, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has been sending back a treasure trove of images and information in its historic flyby of the dwarf planet Pluto. A treasure trove indeed, if we look to the etymology of Pluto. Of gods and dogs American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto at the Lowell Observatory in…
-
debt
English spelling can be a mess. Take the word debt, making its own mess in Greece as we’ve seen, which features a b we write but don’t say. Whence the b? Debt As it appears in the English of the late 14th century, debt is recorded as dete. No b, for the word comes to English from the Old French dette. No b, as…
Mashed Radish 