Tag: Indo-European
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debt
English spelling can be a mess. Take the word debt, making its own mess in Greece as we’ve seen, which features a b we write but don’t say. Whence the b? Debt As it appears in the English of the late 14th century, debt is recorded as dete. No b, for the word comes to English from the Old French dette. No b, as…
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robe
Last week, the US Supreme Court issued a landmark decision, declaring a right to same-sex marriage all across the Union. Court analysts have been going beneath the robes of the justices, especially Justice Kennedy in the case of Obergefell v. Hodges, to deepen our understanding of the man and mind behind the opinion. Let’s go beneath the word robe for an etymological ruling. Robe Robes…
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race
This past Sunday, talk show pundits analyzed the latest developments on the 2016 presidential race. Yesterday, runners braved the rain–and memories–to race in the Boston Marathon. Where does this word race come running from? Race The word race has a lot of legs–and many different meanings over the centuries. In reference to the “act of running,” the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) dates the word…
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gyrocopter
This week, Florida mailman Doug Hughes landed a gyrocopter on the lawn of the US Capitol in a bizarre act of protest against the corrupting influence of money in politics. The incident has compelled many questions, not the least of which is: What’s a gyrocopter? I’ll leave the technical explanation of this rotorcraft to the experts, but let’s…
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Buddha, eBay, & ombudsmen
My wife and I will soon be wat-eyed and pad-tied on our upcoming trip to Cambodia and Thailand. In preparing for these trips, I consulted the cultural, the cartographic, the culinary, the commercial, the communicational–and, of main concern here at the Mashed Radish, the cognates. Thailand predominantly practices Buddhism, as you probably well know. The religion is founded in the…
Mashed Radish 