podictionary - for word lovers - dictionary etymology, trivia & history: Episodes
"Very interestink" thought Dr. Albert Carl Ludwig Gotthilf Guenther, the zoology curator.
English takes the word ghetto from Italian where getto means “foundry.” The reason is that in the 1500s Jews living in Venice were required to live on one particular island, which had previously been the site of a foundry.
Weigh scales come instead from an Old Norse word skal that meant "a drinking bowl." So weigh scales came about because they are made with two pans or bowls, one hanging on each side.
Geoffrey Chaucer used the word dishevley in The Canterbury Tales and by it he meant "bald."
t turns out that most fat dictionaries list two different words felon. One of these is an old word meaning a "big zit" or "enflamed pustule."
Today we use the metaphor of the "thread of a conversation" and similarly our ancestors used the metaphor of a ball or "clue" of thread as an aid in finding their way through a maze.
The Latin root of the word is incubare which figuratively meant to "hatch" or "brood," but literally means "to lie on."
Ptah was the god of creation. You can hear his godly name at the end of the word Egypt.
sophomore literally means half wise and half stupid, as a well educated but highly inexperienced person might seem
The idea (as reported to us by an ancient physician named Galen) is that a tumor is a central mass with enlarged blood vessels running into it and looks vaguely like a crab with its legs & claws sticking out around it.
the guy who called Shakespeare facetious wasn't mean spirited, he was doing a little boot-licking
It's Halloween, the streets filled ghosts gesticulating in excitement. It's appropriate they'll be carrying candy because the root of gesticulate has to do with carrying.
People concerned about their waistlines count calories but just can't get up the energy to say the whole word and have adopted a convention of inaccurately calling food energy calories even though that's only one tenth of one percent of what they mean.
The word chauffeur is older than the internal combustion engine. It first appeared in a French dictionary in 1680, which means it must have been used in speech before that.
insinuate came from renaissance Latin and that in Latin its parent insinuare had already developed all the meanings we adopted into English. But having adopted all those meanings, we then promptly forgot most of them leaving us with our "indirect hint" meaning.
Originally the word was two Latin words manus opera. Manus meant "hand" and opera meant "labor" so that originally to maneuver was to do work by hand.
In the audio version of this episode Penny Kome asks me to do incongruous juxtaposition. Yikes! Here's a helpful definition: incongruous, not congruous.
The Oxford English Dictionary has a list of seven possibilities on the origin in its June 2008 update to the entry; none of which it can give its stamp of authenticity.
The first citation for prep as an abbreviation of prepare was over 100 years ago and originally meant to train a horse.
The Romans were impressed enough by the Greeks that they adopted a whole pile of words from them. Figure is not one of them. Instead they adopted the idea of figure.