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Post by ARENA on Nov 12, 2016 19:12:47 GMT
Facetious—which puzzle fans know is one of the few English words containing the vowels a, e, i, o, u in order—came to English from the Middle French word facetieux, which traces to the Latin word facetia, meaning "jest." Going to use this word for next week's top spelling group, loving the puzzle fact about the vowels. 😀 It's modern meaning is ;to employ sarcastic wit. |
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Post by ARENA on Nov 13, 2016 11:31:29 GMT
SABOT:
The term sabot may have first been introduced into English in a 1607 translation from French: "wooden shoes." Another kind of French sabot—a metal "shoe" used to secure rails to railway ties—is said to be the origin of the word sabotage, from workers destroying the sabots during a French railway strike in the early 1900s.
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Post by ARENA on Nov 14, 2016 13:40:59 GMT
Hoke:
Hoke is a back-formation of hokum, which was probably created as a blend of hocus-pocus and bunkum. Hokum is a word for the theatrical devices used to evoke a desired audience response. The verb hoke appeared in the early 20th century and was originally used (as it still can be today) when actors performed in an exaggerated or overly sentimental way. Today, it is often used adjectivally in the form hoked-up, as in "hoked-up dialogue." The related word hokey was coined soon after hoke to describe things that are corny or phony.
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Post by ARENA on Nov 17, 2016 11:09:13 GMT
OBFUSCATE:
To obfuscate something means to make it so that it isn't clear or transparent, much like dirty water makes it hard to see to the bottom of a pond. The verb shares its ob- root (meaning "over, completely") with obscure, another word that can refer to the act of concealing something or making it more difficult to see or understand. The rest of obfuscate comes from Latin fuscus, which means "dark brown" and is distantly related to our word dusk.
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Post by aubrey on Nov 17, 2016 11:59:31 GMT
Going to use this word for next week's top spelling group, loving the puzzle fact about the vowels. 😀 It's modern meaning is ;to employ sarcastic wit. Until relatively recently "Facetiae" was the word used in second hand bookshops to denote the "erotica", etc section (heh heh), I think because of the Renaissance joke book of the same name by Poggio Bracciolini. You'd look there and there'd be one volume of a 60s edition (yellow; very unattractive) of My Secret Life, possibly old HBs of titles like The Whippingham Papers, The Romance of Lust, the 60s Penguin edition of Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, some joke books and Rugby song collections, and maybe a couple of Ronnie Barker's post card collections - all dusty and dreadfully over-priced: and if you bought anything the bloke would give you a look, and then read the title of it out loud. |
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Post by ARENA on Nov 18, 2016 13:16:15 GMT
LAMBENT:
Fire is frequently associated with lapping or licking imagery: flames are often described as "tongues" that "lick." Lambent, which first appeared in English in the 17th century, is a part of this tradition, coming from lambens, the present participle of the Latin verb lambere, meaning "to lick." In its earliest uses, lambent meant "playing lightly over a surface," "gliding over," or "flickering." These uses were usually applied to flames or light, and by way of that association, the term eventually came to describe things with a radiant or brilliant glow, as Alexander Pope used it in his 1717 poem "Eloisa to Abelard": "Those smiling eyes, attemp'ring ev'ry ray, Shone sweetly lambent with celestial day."
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Post by ARENA on Nov 19, 2016 12:12:41 GMT
MESHUGGENER:
From bagel and chutzpah to shtick and yenta, Yiddish has given English many a colourful term over the years. Meshuggener is another example of what happens when English interprets that rich Jewish language. Meshuggener comes from the Yiddish meshugener, which in turn derives from meshuge, an adjective that is synonymous with crazy or foolish. English speakers have used the adjective form, meshuga or meshugge, to mean "foolish" since the late 1800s; we've dubbed foolish folk meshuggeners since at least 1900.
Any other Yiddish words in English, you know of?
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Post by ARENA on Nov 20, 2016 14:08:33 GMT
NICTITATE:
Nictitate didn't just happen in the blink of an eye; it developed over time as an alteration of the older verb nictate (The guy who built all the galleries), which also means "to wink." Both verbs trace to the Latin word for winking, nictare. The addition of the extra syllable was apparently influenced by Latin verbs ending in -itare, such as palpitare and agitare (which gave us palpitate and agitate, respectively). Today, nictitate has a special use in the animal world. Since the early 18th century, scientists have used nictitating membrane to describe the so-called "third eyelid": the thin, usually transparent membrane in the eyes of birds, fishes, and other vertebrates that helps keep the eyeball moist and clean.
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Post by ARENA on Nov 22, 2016 12:02:28 GMT
PROTOCOL:
In Late Greek, the word prōtokollon referred to the first sheet of a papyrus roll bearing the date of its manufacture. In some instances, it consisted of a flyleaf that was glued to the outside of a manuscript's case and provided a description of its contents. Coming from the Greek prefix prōto- ("first") and the noun kolla ("glue"), prōtokollon gave us our word protocol. In its earliest uses in the 15th century, the word referred to a prologue or preface and also to a record of a document or transaction. In the late 19th century, it began to be used in reference to the etiquette observed by the Head of State of France in ceremonies and relations with other dignitaries. This sense has since extended in meaning to cover any code of proper conduct.
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Post by althea on Nov 22, 2016 22:35:49 GMT
Chutzpah is one Yiddish word that comes to mind.I know I should be able to think of many others,bu they evade me at the moment.
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Post by ARENA on Nov 23, 2016 8:52:36 GMT
schmaltz
Yiddish shmalts, literally, rendered fat.
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Post by ARENA on Nov 24, 2016 15:16:07 GMT
RIDDLE
It is not unusual for words to acquire and lose meanings over time, and riddle is no exception. Old English speakers—who had a variety of spellings for riddle, including hrædels, redelse, and rædelse—used the word as we do today to describe a question posed as a problem to be solved or guessed, but they also used it in the now obsolete senses of "counsel," "consideration," "debate," "conjecture," "interpretation," "imagination," and "example." (Not surprisingly, the Old English source of riddle is a cousin to Old English rǣdan, meaning "to interpret" or "to advise.") By the beginning of the 15th century riddle acquired the sense of "a puzzling or perplexing thing," and in the 17th century it also came to refer to "a puzzling or enigmatic person or being."
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Post by goldelox on Nov 25, 2016 12:59:26 GMT
GENTEEL:
In Roman times, the Latin noun gens was used to refer to a clan, a group of related people. Its plural gentes was used to designate all the people of the world, particularly non-Romans. An adjective form, gentilis, applied to both senses. Over time, the adjective was borrowed and passed through several languages. It came into Old French as gentil, a word that then meant "high-born" (in modern French it means "nice"); that term was carried over into Anglo-French, where English speakers found and borrowed it in the early 17th century.
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Post by ARENA on Nov 25, 2016 13:01:53 GMT
From which of course we get; gentleman.
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Post by ARENA on Nov 26, 2016 15:46:46 GMT
WISTFUL:
Are you yearning to know the history of wistful? If so, we can ease your melancholy a little by telling you that wistful comes from a combination of wishful and wistly, a now obsolete word meaning "intently." We can't say with certainty where wistly came from, but it may have sprung from whistly, an old term meaning "silently" or "quietly." How did the supposed transition from a word meaning "quietly" to one meaning "intently" come about? That's something to muse about, but the answer isn't known.
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