Tag: St. Patrick’s Day
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Catch up with Mashed Radish
This past week has been a kind of High Holidays of etymological trivia. March 14th marked Pi Day: The Greek letter pi (Π, π) comes down from the Semitic Pe (𐤐), believed to originate as a pictogram of a little mouth.🥧🥧 #PiDay #Etymology — John Kelly 🕳️🐇 (@mashedradish) March 14, 2017 Pi Day inevitably makes…
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10 words with surprising Irish roots
From bother and trousers to slogan and slew, the English language has Irish etymology galore. We’re all Irish on St. Patrick’s Day, as we like to say, but so too are many of our words – and not just the more obvious ones like leprechaun or shamrock. There are many other everyday words whose Irish origins…
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Four-leaf etymologies: slew
A good etymology is like finding a four-leaf clover. So often, we stroll through words as if through a field of common trefoil. But sometimes, for reasons I don’t think any of us wholly understand, we chance upon something special hidden in the otherwise ordinary green. This happened to me for the word slew. I think…
Mashed Radish 