For the sake of completion, *hysterical *should be mentioned, although I guess it’s one that everyone already knows. From Greek “hystera”, meaning womb (also the source of “uterus”), originally describing a neurotic condition in women thought to be caused by disturbances of the womb, then somehow coming to mean “very funny”.
I’m sure it’s the same. Maroon is a deep, dark red with lots of brown in it (and maybe a touch of blue).
Color terms notoriously shift spectral ranges over time, and as they pass from language to language. Some come to mean very different colors in different languages. I can’t recall examples offhand, bit they’re easy to look up – for example, a few basic Indo-European roots where the same root came to mean different colors. I think even the Germanic “black” and the Romance “blanc-” (white) might be an example.
“Logistics” is unrelated to “logic” - it’s derived from the same root as “lodge.” (It was originally a military term for the process of moving and housing troops.)
The word “trivia” combines tri and via, basically meaning “three roads”. The trivium were the three “lower” branches of liberal arts study in medieval universities, consisting of grammar, rhetoric, and logic. The four “higher” branches, the quadrivium, were mathematics, geometry, astronomy, and music. Over time, trivium evolved into trivia, minor factual details not of significance.
Purple/púrpura (the same root, not the same color) and maroon/granate (very different roots, and the word which would be the same root is a different color, which is what brought the question to mind). But even the way we’d describe colors is different: the closest I’d come to describing a color as “having brown in it” is some grey-brown mixes.
OED says absolutely. the same.
Untrue. Hiccough was a later spelling.
So… Amir-al-Bahr Ackbar…
What’s untrue? That’s what she’s saying.
:smack:
Sorry.
Fair enough…
I just learned something about New Mexico, where I’ve lived for almost 14 years (I think this counts as etymology).
New Mexico was not named after the modern country of Mexico. According to Wikipedia*:
*I know, not the best source. The three sources they list are:
[8] David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (Yale University Press New Haven and London, 1992), 79.
[9] Joseph P. Sanchez, The Rio Abajo Frontier, 1540-1692: A History of Early Colonial New Mexico (Albuquerque: Museum of Albuquerque History Monograph Series, 1987), 51.
[10] Stewart, George (2008) [1945]. Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States. New York: NYRB Classics. pp. 23–24. ISBN 978-1-59017-273-5. “There was Francisco de Ibarra, a great seeker after gold mines. In 1563 he went far to the north…when he returned south, Ibarra boasted that he had discovered a New Mexico. Doubtless, like others, he stretched the tale, and certainly the land of which he told was well south of the one now so called. Yet men remembered the name Nuevo México, though not at first as that of the region which Coronado had once conquered.”
Cool! I believe it. The “urban” indigenous architecture of the Pueblo and Hopi cultures is striking, and there is hardly anything like it south of there (an exception is Paquime) until you get down to the Aztec – i.e., “Mexica” – architecture in the Valley of Mexico (City).
Seeing as “Akbar” means “great” in Arabic, his name could be translated as “the Great Lord of the Sea”, an apt title for a 5-foot bipedal cephalopod.
*Cartoon *and *carton *both come from cartone, the Italian word for cardboard.
*Cartoon *originally referred to a full-size drawing on cardboard that an artist would make in preparation for painting a mural or portrait. In 1843 London, artists were asked to submit proposals for paintings depicting great events from British history, to adorn the walls of the new House of Parliament. A public exhibit of these cartoons was held, to bring some culture to the masses.
The satirical publication Punch, the Comic Weekly then printed a series of Mr. Punch’s Cartoons, drawings depicting embarrassing events in British history – starting with the way Parliament showed compassion to the crippled and hungry by giving them an art exhibit.
The readers of *Punch *loved the new feature, but not being artists, most of them didn’t know what a *cartoon *was, so they assumed that it referred to a humorous drawing.
Punch, and other so-called comic weeklies (called *comics *for short), printed more and more cartoons, which sometimes took up a substantial portion of the publication. Eventually, the word *comics *began to be used to refer to any printed compilation of cartoons.
The word “negotiate” comes from the Latin “negotium”, which means “business”. OK, straightforward so far. But the Latin “negotium”, in turn, comes from “neg” + “otium”, or “not leisure”.
“Winnebago” means “murky water” or “person of dirty water”.
In the late 70s I attended the Univ. of Wisconsin-Oshkosh (aka UW-Zero), located on the western shore of Lake Winnebago. The legend I heard was that “Winnebago” meant “stinky water”. The Wikipedia article says
Hmmm. Maybe the Russians were calling for the proprietor. <snapping fingers> “Bistro, bistro!” Kinda like some toff calling, “Garçon!” Speaking of “toff” . . .
I swear to God Cockneys must have the most convoluted brains in the world to come up with that rhyming slang stuff.
And, just to contribute to the thread. sangria, the Spanish wine punch, derived its name from the dark red color’s resemblance to blood.
The name “penguin” was originally applied to the extinct Great Auk (Pinguinus impennis), and was used for the S. Hemisphere birds because of the physical resemblance and flightlessness. It might come from the Welsh for “White head” but that’s debatable.
Similarly, “puffin” was the name of the Manx Shearwater (Puffinus puffinus) and was applied to the Puffin because of nesting similarities. The Puffin genus is Fratercula , “friar”, because of the colouring like a monk’s robes.
And that brings us to cappuccino, so-called because it has the colour of a Capuchin friar’s brown robes.
But is that how the Russians say/said subito/snell? I would expect them to say something like сейчас! because it would roll off the tongue easier and sound more demanding.