The British insult “tow rag” or “toe rag”, referring to a contemptible and worthless person, is named after the nautical precusor to toilet paper:
Back in the days of sailing ships, the sailors did not have toilet paper. What they did have were rags. Cloth rags known as “tow”. After having completed their daily evacuations, sailors would engage in ablutions using a rag. This rag was then tied to a rope and dragged behind the ship in order to clean it (or them).
https://snowbirdofparadise.com/2020/04/02/the-tow-rag-explained/
Denim= De Nîmes (from the city of Nîmes)
Jeans = Gênes , the French weird for Genoa.
The cotton weave, indigo dyed cloth originated in Genoa, and in France the main production centre was Nîmes.
So ‘denim jeans’ is both a tautology and a contradiction
I heard that in Czechia and Slovakia, the word for jeans is/was “Rifle” (pronounced “reef-le”), since Rifle was the first brand of jeans imported there in the 80s.
Interesting. Ty
The word “slogan” comes from a swedish word meaning “battle cry”.
SLÅÅÅGAN änna
I don’t think anyone has mentioned “helicopter” yet. It’s not heli and copter like you might think. It’s helico like helix meaning spiral and pter like pterodactyl meaning winged.
Does that mean it has a silent P and we’ve all been pronouncing it wrong this whole time?
Let’s take the helicotter.
Hee-licko-tear
Alternatively, we’ve been saying Pterodactyl wrong this whole time
Not all languages say “Pterodactyl” with a silent P.
Germans have a word for that “Schraubflügler”
/jk
I always like to think of “Hubschrauber” as “hübsch Räuber”.
“Вертолёт” (vertolyot) is a direct copy with “vert” meaning “spin” and “lyot” meaning “to fly”.
In Latin sinister means left (as in the direction), but later it also meant evil or unlucky. That led to the Old French senestre and sinistre, meaning false or unfavorable. Then finally the English sinister meaning malicious.
The etymology for left (especially in reference to handedness) in multiple languages is actually pretty discriminatory.
I’ve heard “a diestra y siniestra” in Spanish which means left and right but it’s Latin and left in Spanish is actually izquierda which doesn’t have clear etymology. Most popular theory is that it comes from Basque language and somehow substituted ‘siniestra’ at some point but it’s contested. It’s mostly agreed it comes from some language that predated Romans and Latin, probably from Pyrenees but no one knows which language that was for sure.
I know isquierda is left in Portuguese too!
I learned a while ago that the opposite of ambidextrous is ambisinister. The “left” origin of the word sinister gives a bit more context, as if describing someone who had two left hands!
Since I’m a left-handed Native American with tan skin and I’m 6’1", I like telling people that I am a tall, dark, and sinister man.
I bet you’re really a muffin!
Fascinate - The oldest meaning of fascinate, “to bewitch” or “to cast a spell over,” comes from the word’s origins in the Latin word for “evil spell.” Over time, that meaning has broadened to mean “to cause to be very interested in,” the idea of “evil” dropping away and leaving the idea of a “spell” or something that attracts and holds our attention.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/evil-origin-of-fascinate
Enchanting!
In “room and board”, board refers to food coverage. The root is “bord” which is old English for table. But this word actually predates English, I believe from proto Germanic as it is also cognate in other Germanic languages. The only reason I learned this is because I’ve been learning Norwegian for several years, where table is “bord”.
Many things leap from the page when you learn a new language. For example, admittedly strange that this never dawned on me, but I simply never even considered that “maybe” is “may” and “be”. That is of course obvious, but it has always just been in my lexicon as the whole word and its meaning. When I realized the Norwegian “kanskje” was literally “kan” and “skje“ or “can happen” my mind was blown.
Alone -> all one.
Oh shit, that’s a good one!
Oh that’s a great one. Bord is also table in Irish.
I’ve been learning Esperanto, which is basically just all loanwords from different European languages, one thing I’m a little embarrassed to have learned that way is that “Peking” as in Peking Duck, is just a different/older spelling/transliteration of “Beijing” since it’s “Pekino” in Esperanto
Been eating Peking Duck for years, never really stopped to consider where or what Peking was until then.
Yeah, there are other recognizable ones from the same postal romanization, like Nanking.
In Dutch we call the city Peking also. Never knew why it was Bejing in English, figured maybe that’s what the Chinese say for it
Old US person here, we used to call it Peking too. I think (haven’t looked it up, but it was what I was told at the time we changed it) it’s a less-accurate version from Westerners who didn’t really listen or asked the wrong person, and Beijing is closer to how the people who live there pronounce it.
Westerners who didn’t really listen or asked the wrong person
Or it was simply the best attempt at the time! Idk if you’ve ever tried to transcribe even your own words phonetically (where you know what sounds you’re enunciating) or tried to guess the spelling (much simpler than phonetics) for a new-to-you word in a foreign language even if you understand the language nearly as well (just don’t have the vocab yet) as a native speaker. It’s really super hard to find letters for sounds!
There’s people whose job is nothing but finding and arguing over the most accurate transcription, e.g. for dictionaries or research, of languages that long have a dictionary, pronunciation guides, learning materials, etc., but are wrong a decent fraction of the time.
Or when they’re not wrong, they’re getting outdated with evolving speech, e.g. “train” has shifted to something like “tchrain” but Merriam Webster claims the transcription is trān while their example pronunciation sounds out [tʒreˑjnə] (loosely: tchraaine) if you listen closely and compare to IPA charts (compare with their entry for “chart”, where they show the ch in the transcription but not the initial t! That looks to me like shart! lol)We might need to give the olden times phoneticians more credit than this 😄. Of course I wasn’t there for it either but I was triggered by what sounds like a dismissive default assumption about people not doing their job properly while in reality we usually all try our best 🙂
Vi lernas Esperanton! Kiel vi faris?
Mi komencis per duolingo, sed nun mi plejparte nur legas vikipedio en Esperanto.
Mi instruas min mem jam ĉirkaŭ 3 jarojn, mi ankoraŭ ne estas tute flua, sed mi progresas.
I’ve always found it fun how in Germanic (and Romance) languages, we still honor the old gods when it comes to the days of the week. Like wednesday being “Wodan’s/Odin’s day” and thursday being “Thor’s day”. I wonder how many devout christians realize this.
I also think the etymology of the German word “Buchstaben” (letter, as in a,b,c) is quite interesting. It literally means “beech rod” and goes back all the way to Germanic tribespeople carving runes into rods made from beechwood.
Interesting! I thought it came from “book” somehow, but that doesn’t really hold up when I think about it.
Well it does! “Book” comes from the Germanic word for “Beech”, because we used beech to write on. Just like in the prior example.
The days thing also works for Romance languages.
Lunedì = dì della Luna = Moon day
Martedì = dì di Marte = Mars day
etc.
Freya’s lucky number was 13.
Christian missionaries trying to convert the Norse heathens spread the concept of Friday the 13th being unlucky to turn people from the old ways
English names of days are weird. You have the day of the sun and the moon, ok. Fine. Then Tuesday - Friday are norse gods (Tyr, Odin, Thor, Freya), but what’s Saturday doing there?! Saturn is a completely different pantheon!
In Czech we have it simple - Monday is “after Sunday”, then there’s Secondday, Middleday, Fourtday, Fifthday, Sabbath and Not-working-day.
It’s funny how I was learning Brazilian Portuguese and the days of the week are like Sábado (Saturday), Domingo (Sunday), but then everything starts becoming “days of the fair”, segunda-feira, terça-feira, quarta-feira, quinta-feira, sexta-feira…
And I, an English speaker, have the gall to still find this confusing when it comes to intuitively using non-weekends.
Like “BuT wHiCh DaY iS tHoR’s DaY?!” Asks the Californian who’s never been a Norseman to their knowledge 😂
The Norse called Saturday “Laugerdagr” which translates to washing day/laundry day. They apparently thought doing the wash was equal to worship of their gods. Which, I don’t totally disagree. (Cleanliness is next to godliness)
The church wasn’t having that though… So they went with the roman God of time. Saturn.
My understanding, though it could be mistaken because I am not a scholar, is that the Germanic peoples were going through and replacing the Roman gods with Norse equivalents. But then they got to Saturn and were like “Hmm, there’s not really a good 1-to-1 match here, so I guess he stays”
That might be fully untrue though. 😅
The Japanese do it cooler. They’ve got sun, moon, and their classical elements. This can be a fun little rabbit hole when trying to understand machine translated business documents
Wait what? Buchstaben = Buchenstab? Never knew that one.
Though in German itself, Wodenstag got replaced with Mittwoch (lit. Midweek) over a millennia ago.
Same I’m Swedish, “bokstav”. Beech staff. Funny enough, bok also means book. Maybe the etymology for book comes from that. Or vice versa.
I’m pretty sure book comes from the French world bouc, which refers to goat skin, which was used to make books in the Middle Ages
Interesting. Maybe it’s still related somehow if two different things were used to make the same item they somehow were named the same thing.
Thought of this while looking up where the term “bootleg” comes from. Turns out people used to conceal flasks of alcohol inside the leg of a tall boot to hide them from authorities during Prohibition.
Similar one for the term “shotgun” when you call the front passenger seat. That’s where the guy with the shotgun sat when goods and people were transported by horse-drawn wagons. Also, a funny sidenote: in Finnish language it’s commonly refered to as “pelkääjän paikka” which translates to “seat of the one being afraid”
I think I want to start using “be with you” instead of bye now.
Yeah “bootleg” is a good one! It just means smuggled, basically.
The abbreviation ‘lbs’ for ‘pounds’ comes from the Roman ‘libre pondo’ meaning ‘a pound by weight’.
This is also the reason the symbol for Libra in the zodiac is scales (Libra is the only sign represented by an inanimate object).
I just learnt this today, and I can’t believe I never noticed before now that ‘lbs’ for ‘pounds’ is weird. I always just mentally glossed over it.
This is also why the symbol for a British pound Sterling is a stylised “L”.
Similarly…Americans size wire carpentry nails as some number followed by a d. 16d nails are most common for nailing together two-by lumber as standard in structures, 8d are used for one-by lumber trim or plywood.
The d is pronounced ‘penny’. And like most of the stupid little stuff we do, it’s the Limeys’ fault.
Back when the UK had three moneys rather than two, they abbreviated pound as L (as above), shilling as S and, for some crumpet eating reason, pence as d. At some point in history, nails were sold in lots of 100, and different sizes at different prices. A box of large framing nails might cost 16 pence, a box of small tacks might cost 4 pence. The terminology has pretty much stuck to this day.
The d symbol for the English penny, comes from the Carolingian denarius, the smallest denomination in the currency of French king Charlemagne’s empire, which became the model currency for several European currencies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny
See? I knew there was some crumpet eating reason.
The Spanish word for pounds (as a unit of weight) is Libre … which also means freedom.
Now I’m wondering why Inches are called Pulgadas. And now I’m wondering why Inches are called Inches in English …
No, libra (the unit of mass), and libre (being free) have unrelated origins, afaik. Libra comes from scales, as in the Libra constellation, wheveas libre comes from liber, related to freedom (and not books (or “libro” in Spanish); that’s a different word), which apparently comes from even older languages, meaning “town” or “people”.
Ah OK, I’ve only ever heard it spoken! (And rarely, only when dealing with American service manuals)
An inch is about a thumb’s width and if I remember my guitar lesson correctly, isn’t pulgadas similar to the word for thumb?
Thumb is pulgar, so that’s plausible
Apothecary
Ancient Greek for “storage shed”.
makes sense
“Great” used to mean “big” rather than “really good”. Which is why the largest of the islands in the North Atlantic archipelago is called “Great Britain”.
This penny dropped for me when I heard someone from GB/IR use something like “that’s grand!” rather than great. That painted quite a literal picture in my head at the time!
“Great-grandmother” is another example where the great=big meaning still shows up…
This isn’t a common term but it’s something I recently learned that’s kind of funny - the country Timor-Leste is named from the Malay word timur, meaning “east”, and the Portuguese word leste, meaning “east”. So it’s literally “East East”.
That’s bizarre …… during the independence violence the news always refers to it as East Timor, so it would have been more literally east east
How is one language more literal than another?
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/XiD4st5MpFg
Apparently, ‘Yucatan’ is named as a joke.
Hahahaha, thanks for that.
A brilliant joke that will last forever!
Mayday comes from French m’aidez which is pronounced similarly, and simply means “help me!”
A lot of naval radio longo is based on poorly pronounced French.
Source: Certified radio operator. I don’t speak French, but I still need to say “Seelonce fini” (probably not spelled like that) from time to time.
Piggybacking off of this one, the reason we say “niner” in the radio to mean “nine” is to prevent it from being mistaken for the German word for no, nein.
The Pilot/Controller Glossary also insists you pronounce “five” as “fife.” Good Luck, With That.
Why five as fife?
Partially because NATO has members that don’t speak English as a first language and how else do you clarify how to pronounce “five” without resorting to IPA? It’s kind of why they insist 4 is pronounced “Fo-wer.”
The v sound is so soft that communication grade radios will sand it off so it sounds like “fie” or “fah” depending. The vowel sound is similar to “nine”, add in some static or pushing the PTT a little too slow and you might mistake “iev” for “ien”, another reason to say niner and to NOT say fiver.
Insisting that you say “Climb and maintain Fife thousand Fife hundred, turn left heading One Fife Niner” makes sure it sounds like words on the far end of the radio.
I’ve also seen some glossaries insist 3 is pronounced “tree” because pronouncing fricatives strong enough to come across on the radio is hard for some NATO member states.
