I’ve taken a short (long) hiatus. It felt good not to have an underlying responsibility to a website, but I feel liek I ought to – it’s fun.
Did you know that the Berserks were a group of Vikings who would go into battle naked? It explains the word origin. I wonder who went trawling through a history book looking for people to be made into terms.
Being made into terms – is that a word? Termify? Termitize? Etymonize? Get to work on that, Linguists.
Why is four spelt with an ‘ou’ but forty with only an ‘o’? The answer lies deep within Proto-Indo-European, the language from which European language arose. Four is from the Old English feower, meaning, of course, four. Forty, however, is from OE feowertig, which comes from feower and tig, meaning a group of ten. Fourteen, on the first hand, is from OE feowertyne, from feower and tyne, which I assume means ten. Feower was twisted via Middle English into Four. The w was turned into a u spelling feouer, which is phonetically similar to four. Feowertig was twisted as well, bit the addition of tig made it twisted slightly differently. We don’t know exactly why it doesn’t have an ‘ou’, but it doesn’t. Isn’t English weird?
An album is a blank white book with spaces to put pictures in. It comes from the Latin album meaning a blank white writing tablet, which is in turn from the Latin albus meaning ‘white’.
I am expecting some sort of discount on Macs soon, being nearly September and all. My old Laptop crashed, so I’ve been using someone else’s. When Fake Steve Jobs says new models approach, you can be sure they are… he’s nearly always right.
In other news, I recently discovered the meaning of serendipity. Well, not the definition, but where it came from. Serendipity is the act of finding something while looking for something else. Oddly enough, I discovered the word serendipitously. Most things are discovered that way in dictionaries.
The word Serendipity is from the old Sri Lankan Play, the three princes of Serendip. Each of these three princes discovered something serendipitously. Kind of like saying Bostoners do things Bostonly.
