Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
This is an old chestnut. How did ‘Raining Cats and Dogs’ come into being, and stay, in the language? The possibilities are few. A foreign phrase is occasionally repeated verbatim or nearly so, and turns into gibberish. It is possible that the first ‘cats and dogs’ were not even animal names.
Anatoly’s monthly gleanings.
English is a language of limitless opportunities. Strange things happen in it. Some words are spelled alike but pronounced differently: ‘bow’ (the bow of a ship) and ‘bow’ (bow and arrows); ‘row’ (she kicked up a row) and ‘row’ (the front row); ‘permit’ (the verb) and ‘permit’ (the noun).
Anatoly Liberman’s weekly column.
Anatoly Liberman ponders longevity.
By Anatoly Liberman In June and July there were several queries about word origins and a general question about the availability of linguistic information, which shows that no heat wave can dry up people’s interest in etymology. Wayzgoose. This word appeared late and is odd because it denotes an entertainment given specifically to printers at […]
By Anatoly Liberman There were days when anybody could write a letter to Notes and Queries, a biweekly magazine published in London, and see it in print a few days later. One correspondent, whose playful but sterile imagination suggested to him the pseudonym BUSHEY HEATH, wrote the following in Volume 12 of the Third Series, […]
By Anatoly Liberman The Old Germanic word for “army” sounded approximately like harjaz. Its Modern German continuation is Heer, and nearly the same word is used in Icelandic, Norwegian, and Danish (army is a borrowing from French; the idea of this word is “armed force”). English has lost harjaz, but it is astounding how many […]
by Anatoly Liberman Alex, a fifth-grader and so far the youngest reader of this blog, wants to know how to start investigating one’s family name. This question interests many people who study their genealogy. (Pay attention to the spelling: in American English, genealogy rhymes with geology, biology, and philology, but its root is Latin genea […]
by Anatoly Liberman Many years ago, I participated in a meeting of Russian and British students in a town that was then called Leningrad. In the Soviet Union, everything, from theaters and community centers to parks and streets, was named after Gorky. At a certain moment, one of the British students began to giggle. When […]
By Anatoly Liberman
Those who look up the origin of a word in a dictionary are rarely interested in the sources of the information they find there. Nor do they realize how debatable most of this information is. Yet serious research stands behind even the controversial statements in a modern etymological dictionary.
by Anatoly Liberman Modern English is swamped with words borrowed from other languages. One does not have to be a specialist to notice the presence of the Romance element in it or to guess that samovar has come from Russian and samurai, from Japanese. It is the details that, as usual, pose problems. Not only […]