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The German for “to give a shot, to vaccinate” is “impf-en.” “Impf-” is an exact cognate of English “imp.” How can it be? This week, the Oxford Etymologist explores the language connection between vaccines, mischievous children, and Icelandic elves.
What is the origin of the name Louvre? Dictionaries and websites say unanimously that the sought-for etymology is unknown or uncertain. Perhaps so, but we will see.
Is English “skin” related to Greek “skēnē”? The story of “skin” and some other words, partly synonymous with it, is worthy of attention.
I received a query from my colleague, who asked me what I think about a possible tie between “Sheela na gig” and the English word “gig.” Therefore, I decided to devote a special post to it.
The label “natural” connotes a certain imagery: freshly grown food, pure water, safe consumption. Things described as “natural” are portrayed as being simple and lacking the intervention of culture, industry, and artificiality. Let’s take a closer look.
Impulses behind word formation never change. This statement surprised one of our readers. However, if we assume that most “natural” words are, at least to some degree, sound-symbolic and/or sound-imitative (onomatopoeic), such monosyllabic complexes as kob, kab, keb, kub, kid, kat, and their likes must have arisen again and again in the course of language history, even if every time they were tied to different objects.
The overlap between English and French idioms is considerable. Familiar quotations from Classical Greek and Latin, to say nothing of the Bible, are taken for granted. A few idioms seem to have come from India, which is not surprising, considering how long British servicemen lived in that country. The Indian connection has rarely been discussed; yet it deserves a brief mention.
“Kid” has a few relatives outside English but in an English text it appeared only around 1200, in a poem so strongly influenced by the language of the Scandinavians that the fact of borrowing is incontestable: “kid” is an import from Danish.
The time has come to find out where cub came from. “Cub,” which surfaced in English texts only in the early sixteenth century, turned out to be an aggressive creature: it ousted whelp, and later the verb “to cub” came into existence. The constant suppression of old words by upstarts is a process worth noticing.
How does the Twenty-fifth Amendment work? Could the Twenty-fifth Amendment cause a problem for President Trump? Can President Trump be impeached if he is considered incompetent? Michael J. Gerhardt provides the answers in this extract from ‘Impeachment: What Everyone Needs to Know’.
As far as I can judge, the origin of “calf”, the animal, contains relatively few riddles, and in this blog, I prefer not to repeat what can be found in solid dictionaries and on reliable websites. But there is a hitch in relation to the frolicsome calf, the lower leg. That is why I decided to give calf a chance…
Recently I had occasion to use the word unsaid, as in what goes unsaid. Looking at that phrase later, I began to ponder the related verb unsay, which means something different.
Open scholarly communication leads to more readership, more impact, and ultimately better research. Oxford University Press (OUP) is the largest university press publisher of open access content. We published our first open access research in 2004 and launched our first fully open access journal in 2005.
Two types of hypotheses compete in etymology. One is learned and the other disconcertingly simple, so that an impartial observer is sometimes hard put to it to choose between them. English whelp resembles the verb yelp, obviously a sound-imitative word, like yap and yawp. Is it possible that such is the origin of whelp?
In 2020 we are proud to be celebrating the 25th anniversary of our Very Short Introductions. Listen to concise and original podcast episodes by our Very Short Introductions authors on a variety of dynamic topics for wherever your curiosity may take you.
The first, perhaps surprising, thing about the words I’ll address below is that language rarely associates the names of adult animals with the names chosen for their progeny. Yet the same is true of humans!