Month: December 2015
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Acquaintance
Should old acquaintance be forgot, as we sing in the New Year with Robert Burns’ “Auld Lang Syne.” While we may be well-acquainted with this tradition, the etymology of the word acquaintance may be much less well-known, shall we say. Acquaintance English gets acquainted with acquaintance from French sometime around the 1300s, at least as the written record is concerned. Deriving from…
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Dos niños: Christmas, weather, and nursery words
What do El Niño and Christmas have in common? It’s not just the unseasonable weather much of the US is experiencing this holiday, though my drought-stricken state of California is getting a much needed White Christmas in the Sierras. No, this weather pattern and Christian holiday also share a crib, etymologically speaking. El Niño Spanish speakers will…
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What is the “chest” in “chestnut”?
I don’t know about you, but I primarily associate the word chestnut with that opening octave in “The Christmas Song”: “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire…” Every holiday season, this melody, this first line, this first word, really gets stuck in my head. This year, with chestnut nipping at my brain, I found myself asking: what is the chest in chestnut? The origin…
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In a “galaxy”… so, so close to home
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away… From its opening lines to its ticket lines, Star Wars, whose latest episode, The Force Awakens, opened this week, is as epic as its interstellar setting. But the etymology of this galaxy, it turns out, is so, so close to home. Galaxy English first gazes at the word galaxy, so to speak, late in…
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Making an “agreement”: a gratifying etymology
This past weekend, nearly 200 nations reached the Paris Agreement, a landmark effort to combat climate change. Now there’s a pleasing word these days: agreement. It’s yet more pleasing if we consider its etymology, and one we should be quite grateful for, too. Agreement It’s apt, I suppose, that the historic climate agreement was negotiated in Paris: agreement is borrowed from the French agrement. English’s agreement is…
Mashed Radish 