Category: Uncategorized
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vaccine
Vaccine For every deadly virus, we hope there is a vaccine. The word, it turns out, milks a very old root. In 1796, British scientist Edward Jenner is credited with inventing the first vaccine by inoculating patients with cowpox in order to protect against smallpox. That’s the nice way of putting it. The story is…
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virus
For so many of us, a virus might spell the end of our computer–not our lives, as we are witnessing so tragically in the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Sometimes a viral video is precisely what is needed to distract us from today’s feverish crises. Too often, though, a viral video may be distracting us from them. But…
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tomato, tomatl
If it weren’t for Nahuatl, what would we be eating? As we saw in a recent post on amnesty and coyote, the latter word originates in Nahuatl. Still spoken by about 1.5 million people and a member of the extensive Uto-Aztecan language family native to the Southwest US and Mexico, Nahuatl actually comprises a large variety of dialects. The one…
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rockets & missiles
Rockets and missiles have been too much with us. Where do the words come from? Rocket Originally referring to “fireworks,” rocket derives from the Italian rocchetto–passing into English from the French roquette in the early 1600s–where it referred to something far gentler and more productive: a “bobbin,” a spool around which yarn is wound. The word is…
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amnesty & coyote
Two other words central to the language of the US border crisis debate are amnesty and coyote. Regardless of your feelings about the implications of their meanings, they certainly make me continually appreciate the diversity of our “immigrant” English tongue. Amnesty Amnesty–a government’s official forgiveness of offenses–came into English in the late 1500s, French via Latin, from the Greek, amnestos,…
Mashed Radish 