Et-ymology… Cor-ner! Ep-isode! Three of Wonder-ful!
I was very excited to hear Rachel mention pretzels. My first linguistics professor was from Germany and she loved to happen about how we mispronounced “brezel”. Obviously pretzels came to the English world through German immigrants, but the root isn’t Germanic, but Latin.
Etymology corner time! *`\_^u^_/`* for Wonderful! episode two.
I was gonna do bar, because the first half of the episode today was basically just Griffin saying the word bar in various ways, but that’s a pretty boring etymology. Instead, let’s talk about one half of the components for that strong strong butt!
Whoa, it’s been over a year since I’ve posted here! Most of my stuff has been on hiatus and I’ve been doing other things like podcasting and not dying and you can find all of that on my newly updated about page but for now I’d like to dump a weekly article I’ve been releasing in the Facebook group for the podcast Wonderful! Wonderful! is a podcast where Griffin and Rachel McElroy talk about their favorite things. (Almost) every week I choose something they discussed and write something up on the history and origins of the word. Here’s the etymology corner for the first episode of Wonderful!
One of my favorite things is etymology, so I loved hearing Rachel talk about the spread of “no worries”. With that in mind, I’m gonna post an etymological fact every episode maybe?
Poor little Henry has pinkeye! Pinkeye is an example of a direct translation, since the Dutch term “pinck oogen” just means pink eye. BUT! This is not due to the color of conjunctivitis! The Dutch “pinck” actually means “small”. We get the color term from a tiny lil cute flower because the Dutch are all about flowers. A lot of colors are named after flowers. Since pinkeye makes the eye crusty and half closed, it all makes sense! That’s also why your smallest and usually not especially pink finger is called a pinky!
You get off the bus and it’s still sorta cold out but not quite cold enough to snow, so you’re drenched in freezing rain. Let me tell you something: there is nothing worse than freezing rain. It reaches to your core and freezes that and then your body takes the rest of your nerves along for the ride. It makes you feel barren. Not even a living human being. You are a husk of ice.
Your history teacher was talking about the Holocaust when Jews and Socialists and Homosexuals were killed and she said that trauma is indescribable with regular words. The only way to know is to feel it yourself. So you know you’re cold, but you can never really tell somebody what it’s like.
Robin Garcia 