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Sassy

actually derived from “sauce” and in the end nothing else but a variant spelling of “saucy” that became independent from its original.

#sassy #incidental information #English #language

Rook

much like the name of the game itself - chess - the name of the rook ultimately derives from the Person word “رخ“ (rox), meaning “castle”.

#rook #incidental information #English #Persian #language

Mathematics

ultimately stemming from the Ancient Greek word “ μανθάνειν” (manthánein) meaning “to learn”.

Apparently all you have to learn is maths.

#maths #incidental information #Greek #language

Walrus

this word is actually wholly unrelated to “walnut”, since it’s a loan, probably from Dutch, consisting of the parts “wal” (whale) and “ros” (horse), which are curiously cognates to their translations.

So next time you see or hear of a walrus, know it’s just a whale-horse.

#walrus #incidental information #English #Dutch #language

Walnuts

the second part of the name probably doesn’t need any explaining since we all know what nuts are, but the first part is interesting, since the Wal- refers to the same as the name of the country “Wales”, this is not because walnuts came from Wales, but rather because Germanic people were pretty uncreative in naming foreigners and basically called all Celts and Romans ~”Welsh”.

And since walnuts initially spread around Europe from France and Italy, they were basically just called “foreign nuts”.

Creative, innit?

#walnut #incidental information #English #language

Whiskey

an anglicisation of Irish “uisce” (water), which is short for “uisce beatha” (water of life), which itself is a translation of Latin “aqua vitae”.

Sounds a bit like a cover-up. “Whatcha drinking?” “Nothing, just water…”

#whiskey #uisce #incidental information #Irish #Latin #English #language

Scot

originally a Roman term for the Irish.

Yes, Scotland was originally named after the Irish, that started settling there in the first millenium AD.

#Scot #Scotland #incidental information #language #Latin

person

derives from the Latin word “persona”, which primarily meant “mask” or “character (in a play)”.

I guess you could draw some deep conclusions about the nature of humanity from that.

#person #incidental information #Latin #language

labia

a Spanish word that can be translated with the beautiful phrase “readiness of tongue”.

In a peculiar way very fitting, isn’t it?

#labia #tongue #incidental information #Spanish #language

Hitler

Hitler’s father Alois was born with the surname “Schicklgruber”, had he not adopted the name of his stepfather, Adolf’s surname would have been “Schicklgruber” too.

I can’t help but think that would have made a lot less popular among non-German neo-Nazis or at least I find it much harder to imagine people running around shouting “Heil Schicklgruber!”

#Hitler #incidental information

Kong

a variant of Danish (or Norwegian) “konge”, meaning “king”.

That made “King Kong” sound a bit different to me.

#kong #konge #incidental information #Danish #Norwegian #language

whore

a rather vulgar word nowadays, interestingly though there was a male version of this word as well, which does not survive into modern English, but into modern Icelandic as “hór” (the female equivalent in Icelandic being “hóra”).

What’s more interesting even is that the most closely related words, outside of Germanic, are words like Latin “carus” (meaning “dear”) or Irish “cara” (meaning “friend”).

I don’t know what conclusion you can draw from this, but maybe ancient Germanic people were just misers.

(And in case anybody ever wondered the “wh” in “whore” is entirely unetymological.)

#whore #incidental information #English #Icelandic #Latin #Irish #language

Soviet (совет)

this word is actually easily translatable, since it simply means “council”. (In political context more specifically “workers’ council”)

I guess “Soviet Union” just sounded catchier than “Council Union”…

#soviet #incidental information #Russian #language

Chai Tea

Just like “karlmaður” this word is just a composition of two times the same thing, since “chai” is just another word for “tea”.

But I guess you knew that already.

But did you also know that almost all literary languages call “tea” by a name similar either to “tea” o “chai”, some of the few exceptions being Polish and Lithuanian, which use “herbata” and “arbata” respectively. (Though again the “-ta” part again is the same as “tea” in English since it’s from Latin herba thea)

#chai #tea #incidental information #Polish #Lithuanian #language

Shibboleth

A shibboleth traditionally is a word which is used to distinguish groups of people from each other based on their pronunciation of that word. (For example asking a suspected Japanese person to pronounce “lollapalooza” believing that a Japanese would not be able to pronounce an l correctly)

On that note: Names for speech impediments (e.g. lisp and rhotacism) tend to be shibboleths for those affected by these impediments. Practical but not necessarily nice.

#shibboleth #incidental information #language

than

not just a Modern English variant of “then”, but also already a Middle English variant of “then”.

Just in case you made that mistake yourself, you can now just pretend that you haven’t quite acclimatised to the changes to English orthography since the death of Geoffrey Chaucer.

#than #then #incidental information #English #language

hunt

an Estonian word meaning “wolf”.

#hunt #incidental information #Estonian #language

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