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Sting-Nettle Day

The species of nettle we’re talking about here is Urtica dioica. The Urtica part is a direct borrowing from the Latin urtīca, ‘nettle’, which in turn is from ūrere, ‘to burn’. That makes sense. Ouch! Nettles do make your skin feel as if it’s burning. And that burning is expressed in the prefix to the Danish word for stinging nettles, brændenælder, Danish using the same verb for ‘to burn’ and ‘to sting’. That same Latin word urtīca is also the root of the technical name for nettle rash, urticaria.

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Japanese words in English

As an example of the Japaneseing aesthetic craze, in the first chapter of Oscar Wilde’s largely indigestible The Picture of Dorian Gray, the birds in flight that cast shadows across the heavy tussore silk drapes of the painter’s decadent studio produce ‘a kind of momentary Japanese effect’.

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The holly and the ivy: wonderful words for Christmas plants

IYAM, certain plants just shout ‘Christmas’, don’t they? Well, perhaps some are a bit shoutier than others. The traditional holly, ivy, mistletoe and winterberry are on the subtler side, while on the brasher wing we find Christmas cactus and poinsettias. And there are other plants which come into prominence at this time of year, especially – for me, at any rate – cyclamens and amaryllis.

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Celebrating Advent

Advent in Church terms begins on the Sunday nearest 30 November and covers the period from then until Christmas Eve, while in popular use it starts on 1 December. It refers to Jesus’s forthcoming arrival into the world and also to his eventual return one day in the Second Coming. (I say a bit about the word’s origins at the end.)

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Monetizing the sacred. Some thoughts on a word and a meaning.

The other day, reading the very engaging Ships of Heaven, a book about a ‘curated’ [my word] selection of British cathedrals, I was struck by the author’s use of the verb ‘to monetize’. ‘Struck’ for several reasons. (Actually, four – I think – as we'll see.) First, because the context in which they used it put the Middle Ages in your face in a way that forced me ‘to sit up and take notice’.

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Hoorah! It’s the spring or vernal equinox

Today marks the vernal equinox. The event that ought to herald spring, despite the less than springlike weather Britain has been enjoying recently. While the meteorologists have already kicked 'spring' off to a start at the beginning of the month, today is when 'astronomical spring' begins.

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Nuts, nostalgia and ‘as sweet as a nut’.

Nuts feature in two types of metaphor The first is a euphemism for, ahem, testicles. Clearly perceived similarity of shape is the root or the ‘grounds’ of the metaphor. The popular Australian brand of edible nuts ‘Nobby’s Nuts’ exploits potential double-entendres to the full, particularly in an ad it used a while back: ‘Nibble Nobby’s Nuts.’

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You say catafalque, I say catafalco – or grave or tomb

TV coverage of Her Late Majesty's demise and the Accession of the new King has focused attention on funereal language in general. And in particular a word we rarely get to hear or read, catafalque, has intrigued people.... That set me thinking about where other language of funerals comes from. It’s perhaps surprising how many of the words listed and discussed below are loanwords. Of catafalque, bier, hearse, coffin, funeral, grieve, mourn, bury, widow(er), grave and tomb, only bier, mourn, bury, widow(er) and grave are Germanic, i.e. inherited from Old English.

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The Queen’s death: Royal and ritual language and procedures since

As a friend recently phrased it, before that it had been possible to hold two contradictory ideas in one’s head: that the Queen was very old and that she would live forever... The extent of the affection, regard and respect for her shown by the public since her death amounts to that oxymoron, a secular canonisation. Earl Marshal is an interesting compound noun which is in a sense a microcosm of the Norman Conquest, for it unites the Old English/Anglo-Saxon eorl with the Norman French marshal.

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Teslas and the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon

There’s a name for this well-known phenomenon: ‘the frequency illusion’.1 It’s a cognitive bias that, in my estimation, particularly afflicts people with an unhealthy interest in how people use language – ‘language peevers’ as the uncharitable label them/us.

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Macron, he-vage, Donne and merkins

Recently, President Macron was photographed in a pose that in more innocent times would have embarrassed even a cash-strapped gigolo. ...  Said Philip Sydney, buttoning his jerkin ‘Allow me, darling: you have dropped your merkin.’

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Scurrilous accusations

Many journalists picked up on a single word in her resignation letter: scurrilous. The reason seems fairly obvious: scurrilous accusation is a great soundbite. That said, I can’t help wondering, cynic that I am, about a couple of other things. Did the hacks relish it because it’s not a word you come across every day? And how many people googled it to find out what it means?

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National Tree Week: time to love your nearest tree

I love how the silhouettes of winter trees give the skyline a jaggier rhythm, unlike the smooth legato of summer lushness. As I look out from my second-floor study, I feel airborne, level as I am with the middle branches of the beech trees in the grounds behind our house. Mercifully, they are protected by TPOs (Tree Protection Orders).

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Road map or roadmap. One word or two?

In an up-to-date corpus of 20 varieties of English, roadmap is about twice as common as road map. In a corpus built in 2104, the two forms were even-stevens, just about, but by the time of a 2018 corpus the ratio was 3:1 in favour of roadmap. It’s a historical process that has happened repeatedly. When Jane Austen wrote any body she did not mean 'any old cadaver'; body in her sense meant 'person'.

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Honey catches more flies than vinegar (2). A Pan-European proverb? On prend plus de mouches avec une cuillerée de miel qu’avec cent barils de vinaigre; Más moscas se cogen con miel que con hiel

Learning Italian in the UK is nowadays a minority pursuit. In contrast, in the late sixteenth century to know it was an important weapon in the intellectual armoury of the elite: Lady Jane Grey, Queen Elizabeth and James VI and I’s consort, Anne of Denmark, all knew la bella lingua. John Florio, the author of the first substantial Italian-English dictionary, was a groom of Queen Anne’s chamber and enjoyed a position at court. Torriano inherited Florio’s manuscripts and published in 1639 New and Easie Directions for attaining the Thuscan Italian tongue and the year after that The Italian Tutor.

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champ vs. chomp (at the bit). A short history.

In summary: champ is older as a verb in its own right, by anything between 51 and 183 years (depending on which source you go by); ‘the dictionaries’ agree that chomp is a by-form of champ; three major English dictionaries define chomp by reference back to champ; chomp in conjunction with bit is actually recorded earlier (1645) than champ at the bit, and the subsequent OED citation for chomp also includes the word bit; and Merriam-Webster shows an intransitive chomp meaning – ‘to be eager (to do)’ – that neither Collins nor the OED does.

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Penguin awareness, penguin suits, Penguin books & Welsh

I bet you’ll never guess from which language English borrowed penguin. Could it be from those adventurous mariners the Dutch, as their word is pinguïn? Or perhaps from a Polynesian language? Nope, neither of those. It’s most probably from…
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Meanwhile, English being so footloose – nay, cavalier – with parts of speech, it was inevitable that Penguin books should hatch a verb.

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Bonk, betrothed, boogie, swot, yonks & other words the young don’t know.

Bonk the verb first came into the world – in print, at least – in 1929 as a ‘conversion’ of the British interjection of the same year, which is clearly onomatopoeic. As the OED comprehensively notes ‘Representing an abrupt, typically hollow-sounding, heavy thumping noise, as of a blow, or one hard or unyielding object striking another.’ The verb in this sense is ‘to strike something hard or unyielding’ and the second OED citation shows a writer trying to convey a sequence of disparate noises: The carrier men…bonked and rattled and squerked the package through the almost too small doorway and set it down with a thump. N. Hunter, Professor Branestawm's Treasure Hunt i. 13, 1937   The sexual meaning is first recorded from 1975. Its achievement, at least in Britain, was to give people a word they could use without stammering or blushing to describe an act which theretofore could only be described by euphemism, coarse slang or the starchy language of medicine. Here instead was a ‘fun’ word: short, somewhat childish yet sooo satisfying to say. It had a sort of ‘naughty but nice’ feel, risqué, but then again, not really. And it seemed a lot less crude and slangy than s**g. Dot Wordsworth waxes lyrical about it while surprised how many of the surveyed respondents appeared not to know it (37%).

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As fit as a butcher’s dog. Boris Johnson’s favourite simile.

Boris really loves his metaphors, doesn't he, and is (in)famous for them. And one that he has very recently recycled is 'fit as a butcher's dog'. He first used it at the tail end of June (see what I did there?) as part of a campaign to improve the nation’s health and beat the obesity epidemic, when he had himself photographed doing press-ups and proudly proclaimed himself 'as fit as a butcher’s dog.'

On Monday 16 November 2020 he was at it again, being 'fit as a butcher's dog' as he videoed (that spelling looks odd but it's correct) from isolation, looking tousled and slim of face.