Tag: French
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loot
Some etymologies drive the point home perfectly–and others have a way of bringing it all together. Such is the case with the word loot, which has surfaced–and I think in an insidiously racialized manner–amid the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri. Its origin, however, is far, far away from the American Midwest. Loot Loot derives from the Hindi lut, meaning “spoil,”…
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comedy & tragedy
Comedy & Tragedy According to Mallory and Adams in The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World, there are 24 distinct verbs concerned with speaking in Proto-Indo-European. But if headlines these past weeks have been any measure, we all feel a bit speechless in our great many daughter Indo-European languages. One such root for speech is *wed-, which…
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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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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…
Mashed Radish 