Pylimitics

When you’re exploring a vegetable garden, you might note that most of the produce is edible. You’d be in good Latin company if you did; “edible” comes directly from the Latin “edibilis,” and in both Latin and English it means something you can eat. But you might, of course, have accidentally stumbled into an 18th-century… Continue reading

If you place things diagonally, for example on the opposite corners of a four-way intersection, it’s sometimes said that those things are “kitty corner” to each other. Most people seem to know what that means, but hardly anybody knows why “kitty corner” came to have that meaning.  It all started with dice. People have used… Continue reading

More than one child? That’s “children”. Add another ox and you have “oxen”. But a “chicken” is just a single one. What’s going on, besides another run-of-the-mill bit of inconsistency in the world’s most inconsistent language? First the use of “-en” to pluralize a word. That goes back to Old English, where “-en” was commonly… Continue reading

Summer the time of year when you can see butterflies. But what’s with the “butter” in “butterfly”? Butterflies aren’t drawn to butter; they alight on flowers. It’s regular non-butter flies that would prefer butter.  It could be that “butterfly” is “flutter by” slightly mixed up, like a young child might. After all, butterflies definitely do… Continue reading

When you’re considering a choice involving different alternatives, you can be said to be “weighing your options.” “Weighing” in this context means pondering or thinking over carefully. If you take that idea, that “weighing” is “considering,” and you go back a few centuries to when English took a look at Latin and saw a vulnerable… Continue reading