Showing posts with label Plum. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Plum. Show all posts

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.