One leading theory (I HOPE it’s true, though I can’t vouch that it is) is that the butterfly gets its name because one of its favorite foods is pollen… which means its poop comes out looking like tiny pieces of butter.
I’d never consider a 3way as trivial.
This isn’t etymology, strictly speaking, but it’s interesting anyway.
In the English language, almost all the names of common farm animals (pig, cow, chicken, sheep) are of Germanic original. However, almost all of the names for the meats that come from these animals (pork, beef, poultry, mutton) are of French origin.
Which sort of makes sense… you have to figure that, in medieval England, it was peasants of German descent who raised the animals and it was rich noblemen of French descent who ate the meat.
I’ve always assumed that the word bird came from the song of the cardinal birdee birdee birdee.
The distress call **Mayday **comes from the French **m’aidez **(help me)
“Coach” is one of the few words in English that derives from Hungarian roots. It ultimately derives from the town of Kocs, about a third of the way from Budapest to Vienna, where a type of horse-drawn carriage was made popular throughout Europe.
The brand name Adidas
Originally a shoe company started by two German brothers Rudolf and Adi Dassler. The name came from putting ADI+DASsler.
The two brothers later had a fall out and Rudolf went on to start his own shoe company: Puma.
Spaghetti means little strings, vermicelli means little worms, linguine means little tongues.
Richard Shenkman includes this in his book Legends, Lies, and Cherished Myths of American History, which is copiously referenced and footnoted, including all claims. I don’t have my copy here, but if you look in there you’ll find references to respectable history journals on this (and his other topics). It seems to be legit.
The word Miniature is unrelated to words like minimum, minute, minuscule, minor (which come from Latin minimus= small), but derives instead from the Latin minium - red lead - a pigment used to outline illuminated illustrations (of any size, later, small because books got smaller) in manuscripts.
“Cherry” is taken from the french “cerise” which means exactly that. But the French word sounds like a plural in English, so the English assumed it was a plural (like “cherries”) and invented a the singular “cherry” to have that as its plural.
The standard citation on the origin of “O.K.” is Allen Walker Read’s articles in the journal American Speech in 1963 and 1964. You may argue with them, but you’d better read them if you want to convince anybody that the theory that “O.K.” originated as an abbreviation of “oll korrect” in Boston in 1839 is just an urban legend. This is the standard explanation, and Read gave a lot of evidence for it.
That’s cool. THere are actually qute a few pairs of words that AREN’T cognates (or related words in the same language), but sure as heck look like they should be.
The English “day”, for example, does NOT come from Latin dies, nor from any shared earlier root. (We do get “diurnal” from dies, though.)
So, the fact that the last syllable of, say, French mercredi sounds just like the last syllable of English “Wednesday” (as pronounced by some Americans, anyway), is just a coincidence.
Actually, minuscule doesn’t quite fit with the others, as the “minu-” rather than “mini-” spelling makes clear (although it is more closely related than “miniature” is). minuscule comes by way of French from Latin minusculus, which derives from minus.
minimum, to choose one “mini-” word, comes from Latin minimus, which comes from minor
You’re missing the point. All the words except “miniature” (when referring to the craft form) come from the same basic Indo-European root meaning “small”.
No sense in picking an arbitrary time horizon (you went for Roman Empire times, it seems) and teasing out the word-paths at that point.
Yes, chimpanzees, humans, and sponges are all animals. But…
In English, a zero is sometimes called “a goose egg.” That same figure of speech has long been used in France.
In French, the word for egg is “l’oeuf.” And that’s why “love” is the term used for zero in tennis.
Likewise, *pea *is a back formation from pease, which sounds like a plural.
An apron was oringinally a napron.
An adder was a nadder.
An auger was a nauger.
A nickname as an eke name.
And there are a few other examples of these types of faulty separations in English. (“Orange,” however, was never “a norange” in English. The separation had already occurred before being introduced into English. Looks like it happened in French.)
You are correct, except that it means “from Vinci”, not “from Venice”. Leonardo was from Tuscany.
Also, regarding “trivia”, my dictionary says it is from Latin “trivialis”, meaning “belonging to the streets; common”, which does come from *trivium *meaning a junction of three roads. So perhaps Bryson was right?
No, I’m not missing the point, as I quite clearly stated. But “minuscule” is still on its own branchlet away from the others, although not as far removed as c"miniatur".