yetimology: [n.] The study of those abominable words that are large, wild and probably fictitious. (I hoped it was going to be funnier, but summer’s over.)
Glad to see the French are bemoaning the death of Cockney. There’s a lovely bit in George Borrow’s Romany Rye where he has moved into an inn in which there was a barber and hair-dresser, who had been at Paris, and talked French with a cockney accent; the French sounding all the better, as no…
Xavier (check his crazy blog, Le dicon) in an interesting comment has introduced me to Jean-Pierre Brisset. Brisset is interesting because he anticipates Derrida (différance) by taking a a lexical trick that works only in French and using it as the basis for universal theory, despite most of us not having been blessed with an…
While we’re on things Flemish, I’m afraid I have a tendency to disbelieve shibboleth stories. The big one in these parts is that of the brave Flemish-speakers identifying the craven French-speakers after a battle in 1302 by politely asking them to say “scilt ende vrient”. That’s debunked by Bill Poser here. An alternative version has…
Here’s one: blah (n.) “idle, meaningless talk,” 1918, probably echoic; the adj. meaning “bland, dull” is from 1919, perhaps infl. by Fr. blasé “bored, indifferent.” The blahs “depression” is first attested 1969. And here’s another: Blah as an actual word originated in the U.S. as an imitation of the sound of meaningless talk. In 1918…
Via Onze Taal: “For years Martin van Acht (39) from Eindhoven thought that the only Dutch in existence was Brabant dialect. What a surprise he got when at secondary school he suddenly had to learn how to talk General Civilised Dutch.” I once joined a local band to learn Dutch and it was only when…
“And as we find in a book of laws called Digesto that city used to be called Guiris because it was created by Garfeus, son of Canaan and grandson of Noah.”