Tag: French
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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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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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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…
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Gerbils (and etymology) will bring us all together
For this post, I thought about writing on the etymology of demagogue or bigotry, which have been much in the ether lately, thanks especially to Donald Trump. But I thought twice, important as these words are right now. I thought twice because I wanted to write on something a bit more positive and, well, fun than many of…
Mashed Radish 