No.
There was a time when this was a method of rescue. By analogy, if you were over a barrel, you were helpless and trying to catch your breath and too weak to resist if someone tried to do something.
I don’t think you can really answer so categorically.
Yeah, I know that is the explanation offered today by etymologists, but as far as I can discern, it is based on nothing more than conjecture. I think my conjecture makes more sense. I am confident that more than one young sailor found themselves unwillingly “over a barrel” in my sense of the phrase back in the day. And talk about helplessness…
Add some -ectomy, -otomy or -ostomy and you’ll know if the doc intends to cut into or cut off the -itis’d body part.
They probably didn’t take it from the Greeks. Both etymologies likely descended from the probable original Indo-European sky-deity.
I could have kicked myself when I realized the etymology of surly, it really sticks out like a sore thumb (although the spelling, which changed, does tend to mask it).
The original form was sirly, and that’s precisely what it was, acting in the manner of a Sir or Lord, ie masterful, imperious, haughty. The sense too gradually changed to, as OED puts it, ‘churlishly ill-humoured; rude and cross’.
Talk about hiding in plain sight.
From Wikipedia:
“Stromboli is a small island in the Tyrrhenian Sea, off the north coast of Sicily, containing one of the three active volcanoes in Italy.”
So, it was a nice little revelation to hear that one of my favorite foods was probably named after an Italian island. Quaint and proper.
But, then:
“In ancient Roman religion and myth, Vulcan is the god of fire including the fire of volcanoes”
Volcano = Vulcan.
Head explodes
It wasn’t very long ago that I discovered the words *of *and *off *were both the same word in Old English.
Better rescue method than blowing smoke up your ass…
Are we sure about this?
I thought it was a fishing metaphor. You throw out sucker bait into the water so that fish will more readily bite your hook.
Reading another thread I just twigged Christmas. It’s a Cathlolic thing, right? Mass?
FWIW, here is etymonline’s take on it:
You’re right on the etymology (Christ’s Mass)…but Mass is hardly a Catholic-only thing, and the name goes back to well before that’s a meaningful distinction in Western Christianity.
Window = wind door
I have often wondered about the etymology of words like millionth, billionth, trillionth, etc.
I know that it looks fairly obvious. But how and why would such words all end with the same kind of suffix? It is a real puzzler to me.
And to terentii, I would just like to say that I did not see your post until after I had made mine and it just made me think of an old but quite well known English phrase. I hope that I am correct in assuming that your primary language is not English. But, whether it is or whether it’s not, it still applies and I will send you a PM with the name of that phrase. However, I would hope that you would keep that name between the two of us.
Actually, it’s “wind eye.”
Santa Claus … Saint NICK-laus (St. Nicholas)
Although I didn’t realize it- I read it somewhere. If it’s incorrect, I’m sure someone will tell me.
By way of the Dutch version, Sinterklaas.
For the same reason we have fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth. Admittedly first second and third are irregular, but once we get up to four we give up and have regular -th’s from there on out.
Here’s a couple of things about where -th for ordinal numbers in English comes from:
There are a lot of words that are basically slurred versions of other words, and for many of these, it took me an absurdly long time to make the connection… I just accepted the slurred versions as words in their own right. For example, I can remember the “light bulb” sensation when I realized that “skeeter” was just a truncated version of the word “mosquito” rather than, I don’t know, a separate word meaning “something that skeets”. It even took me a while to get the fact that “Injun” is a two-syllable version of the word “Indian”.
I had a similar experience suddenly realizing that “Eeyore” was named after the stereotypical noise a donkey makes.