Tag: Greek
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crisis & turmoil
Fast Mash Crisis originally referred to point in which an illness would get better or worse It comes from the Greek, krisis (decision, sifting) The Proto-Indo-European root is *krei-/*ker- (separate, sift, sieve); cognates range from ascertain to excrement to crime Turmoil likely comes from the French tremouille, evoking the commotion of a “mill hopper” This…
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monger
Before we begin, I want to welcome all my new readers–or, dare I say, my fellow blog-mongers. But seriously, though. Wow; I’m flattered. Really. Thanks! Now, let’s get to the scoundrels. Part of me thinks of monger as an historical artifact or romantic relic of a simpler time, a time when our work was our wares.…
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super bowl
Whoever wins, I think the real champion of the Super Bowl is “Super Bowl.” Generation after generation, the roots of super and bowl have been moving their linguistic chains down the field. But before we look at their etymological playbook, why did the Super Bowl even take that name? “Bowl” Games In the late 1950s, there was a…
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dream
Fast Mash Old English had a word, dream, meaning “joy,” “jubilation,” “music,” or “minstrelsy,” via Old Norse draumr and which may be related to the Greek thrulos (“noise,” “shouting”) This Old English dream has no certain relationship to the Middle English drem, which gives us our current word for dream, via Old Norse draugr and possibly rooted in West Germanic *draugmas (“deception,” “apparition,” phantasm”) or Proto-Indo-European *dhreugh– (“deceive,”…
Mashed Radish 