Friday 18 February 2011

Words, words, words

There I am, just vacantly tootling along, thinking either about nothing at all or which bottle to open this evening and then a word just zooms along and - bang! - after years of failing to see the etymological link, there it is staring me in my face (faccia in Italian but that one's too obvious). 'To avoid' in Italian is evitare, and then I heard someone on the wireless say "inevitable" - light bulb time! But why don't we have 'evitable'? Well, we do actually but has anyone ever heard it used? I haven't, but it's there in Chambers. And then there's one of my favourites (another that no one uses), 'beaker'. And guess what Italian for glass is? Bicchiere! Bingo, another shaft of illumination that I should have clocked years ago, especially with all the beakers of Sercial I've caned in Gordon's.
Etymology is one of the few interests I managed to acquire at St. Custard's when in an early Latin class, our master 'Plum' Tucker wrote one word on the blackboard:  

peninsula 

 and then asked us how the word came about. We just sat there in our freezing Devonshire classroom, smelling of manure and Horlick's tablets, and then underneath he wrote two Latin words:

paene (almost) + insula (island)

and ecco! revelation. Thanks Plum, against all the odds something stuck.

7 comments:

Affer said...

Peninsula is the medical term for the thing I stick in myself daily, to squirt in 45 units of some strange chemical.

Any ideas on the etymological source of lobotomy? I always felt it was about priests with short legs..........

Peter Ashley said...

Words are amazing aren't they? My trouble is I read a word I haven't seen before and then can't stop using it. The most recent example is 'nexus' which I first came across in the brilliant Iain Sinclair's Lights Out for The Territory. It is so much more succinct than 'the environs' of a particular location. But I must now use it less, like I've stopped trying to say 'iconic' after Jonathan Meades gave the word such an erudite drubbing.

Diplomate said...

ah - marvelous - I think this could be the meat of the blogging sandwich. Crank that brain up Ron and don't be put off by flash-backs to St Custard's.

Vinogirl said...

Good stuff Mr. Combo.

Thud said...

Good stuff.... from one here on an almost island.

Eddie 2-Sox said...

Is savoy cabbage anything to do with the hotels? And is it rooted in the French verb savoir?

Wartime Housewife said...

I have an etymological dictionary and I like it a lot.