Ask Lemmy

Not sure if this is semi-common knowledge or not, but:

I'm sure everyone is familiar with at least one of the geographical adjectives for the cardinal directions: Oriental, generally meaning eastern.

Similarly, you can probably see the connection for the North: Boreal. As in Aurora Borealis.

Known to a lesser degree, there is Occidental, meaning western. I don't have a connection for this one off the top of my head.

And finally, for the sake of this comment, there is the term for the South: Austral. Of course, this is where we get "Australia."

As such, the magnetic light show of the Antarctic is not aurora borealis. It is, in fact, aptly named aurora australis.

Another fun side note: There was allegedly support for the idea of naming Canada Borealia. I personally like this idea, because it tickles my inner 12 year old.

"Helicopter" isn't heli - copter

It's helico - pter.

Helico: Greek for helix or spiral.

Pter: Greek for wing, like a pterodactyl.

Tried and True.

To you it probably means "tested and found to be reliable/trustworthy." An example, a few days ago the topic of a car without hydraulic brakes made the rounds. Hydraulic brakes on passenger cars are "tried and true," we trust them, and are skeptical of a vehicle without them. But that's not where the phrase originally came from; it's a centuries old woodworking term.

This is a try square. An OLD tool; examples survive from ancient Egypt. It's such a basic tool that it's often used as the symbol of the carpentry trade. "Try" in this case means "examine" rather than "attempt", more like how a judge "tries" a case than a jedi trainee "tries" to lift an X-wing out of a swamp. A try square is used to examine a board. For squareness, and possibly also straightness and flatness. A board that passes this exam is said to be "true."

"True" meaning straight, flat, parallel or even concentric is still in use to this day; "truing" a surface means to flatten it.

The word 'dog' is interesting because it essentially has no etymology. It has no known cognates in English/Germanic/other Indo-European languages. It first showed up in Old English as dogca, referring to some sort of mastiff, but other than that nobody really has any idea at all where it came from.

Either „tea“ or „cha/chai“ exist in some form in virtually every language that has encountered tea, and the distinction between which was adopted generally has to do with whether it was first traded with the country by land (cha) from China or by sea (tea) from Malaysia.

In Russian the days of the week are mostly numbers, e.g. Tuesday is the second day, so Tuesday is Вторник, which comes from второй (second) and the suffix -ник for day. But Monday is not перник as you would expect (первых + ник), instead Monday is Понедельник. This is short for после (after) не (not) делать (doing) -ник (day), i.e the day after not doing anything (Sunday).

In Finnish a tietosanakirja is an encyclopedia, this is a composed word made from tieto (knowledge) and sanakirja (Dictionary). But also sanakirja is a composed word made out from sana (word) and kirja (book). So an encyclopedia is a book of words of knowledge.

Muscle comes from latin and means little mouse.

'Bully' used to mean good friend. There's a scene in Shakespeare (who else?) where he talks about someone sending his bully boys to teach someone a lesson, meaning he sent his close friends. But, over time, people took it to mean his thuggish friends and so the word's meaning shifted.

A hassle is a foreign inclusion in a wool top (what is spun into yarn), which is a real hassle to remove.

A skanky fleece is a wool fleece that is matted and infested with maggots.

The terms date back to the 19rh century.

You might be familiar with the radio term "roger." Per the FAA's Pilot/Controller Glossary, it means "I have received all of your last transmission. It should not be used to answer a question requiring a yes or no answer."

They want to make it VERY clear that roger does not mean "yes." So why do we use the word "roger" to mean "acknowledged"? Because Americans in World War II.

First of all, radio was still a fairly new warfighting tool in the 1940's. In a lot of cases, they still used Morse code tapped out by telegraphers on straight keys. Morse code was like the SMS of its day, it takes a long time to spell each letter out, so you end up with abbreviations, some of which really only make sense if you're familiar with Morse. For example, you know the radio practice of saying "over" and "out?" In morse code, you use K (-.-) to mean "over" and KN (-.- -.) to mean "out." There's an entire list of "Q codes", for example, you can tell someone to reduce their transmitter power by simply transmitting QRP (--.- .-. .--.). There's one that means "what's your barometric pressure?" because aviation. You'll still sometimes hear "What's QNH?" in aviation circles.

Most relevantly, a reply that simply means "I have received all of your last transmission" is simply abbreviated to R (.-.).

They also had AM voice mode radios. And now we get to talk about phonetic alphabets. We've all independently invented one at least once, talking to tech support on the phone and reading a serial number "One Three Four D as in Dog, Two, E as in Egg, Seven Eight one." Because a bunch of letters sound the same when saying them out loud. You might be familiar with the modern one used by NATO, also required by the aviation world via ICAO. Starts out Alpha Bravo Charlie Delta etc. R in the modern one is Romeo. But NATO formed well after WWII.

The phonetic alphabet used during WWII by English speaking nations went Able Baker Charlie Dog Easy Fox etc etc. Peter Queen Roger Sugar etc etc Xray Yoke Zebra.

So we say "Roger" because in WWII the Morse code abbreviation for "received" was R and the letter R would be pronounced "Roger" on an AM transmitter, and even though the phonetic alphabet has moved on, the word remains in use with a specific definition.

“Son of a gun” is from when sailing ships would come into port. The sex workers would row out to them and have sex with an entire gun crew.

When the kid was born they didn’t know who the father was so he was a “son of a gun” aka a bastard.

Floors in the Middle Ages were dirt covered with straw for insulation and other reasons.

Threshold = thresh (straw) + hold (a piece of wood across the front doorway to stop the thresh from spilling out)

Denim= De Nîmes (from the city of Nîmes)

Jeans = Gênes , the French weird for Genoa.

The cotton weave, indigo dyed cloth originated in Genoa, and in France the main production centre was Nîmes.

So 'denim jeans' is both a tautology and a contradiction

I don't think anyone has mentioned "helicopter" yet. It's not heli and copter like you might think. It's helico like helix meaning spiral and pter like pterodactyl meaning winged.

Thought of this while looking up where the term "bootleg" comes from. Turns out people used to conceal flasks of alcohol inside the leg of a tall boot to hide them from authorities during Prohibition.

Similar one for the term "shotgun" when you call the front passenger seat. That's where the guy with the shotgun sat when goods and people were transported by horse-drawn wagons. Also, a funny sidenote: in Finnish language it's commonly refered to as "pelkääjän paikka" which translates to "seat for the one being afraid"

Edit: Goodbye - God be with ye

In English, the words for many animals (chicken, cow, sheep, deer, pig) are derived from proto-germanic, while the word for their meat (poultry, beef, mutton, venison, pork) is French derived.

Bonus: A good chunk of river names are just "River" in the local language. So many River Rivers from newcomers adopting the river names, not knowing it just means "river"

The word "nice" used to mean "stupid." It derives from the Latin "nescio" (translated: "I don't know") and carried over into old French. At some point, it came to be associated with generosity, the assumption being that someone stupid is too innocent or naive to be selfish.

It then got carried over into middle English, and the connotation for stupidity got dropped, making it so that the word meant "kind," as opposed to "stupidly kind"

The term "snorkel" is related to the German word for snoring.

Back in WW2, U-boats (and pretty much all submarines) needed to surface so that they would be able to run their diesel engines in order to charge their batteries because diesel combustion requires oxygen. One German scientist developed a way to get air without having to surface the boat. As this was a very big tactical advantage it was, obviously top secret. In order to not give away what it was, he referred to it by the sound it made i.e. that of someone snoring.

EDITED with new info from helpful Lemmings.

I've always found it fun how in Germanic (and Romance) languages, we still honor the old gods when it comes to the days of the week. Like wednesday being "Wodan's/Odin's day" and thursday being "Thor's day". I wonder how many devout christians realize this.

I also think the etymology of the German word "Buchstaben" (letter, as in a,b,c) is pretty interesting. It literally means "beech rod" and goes back all the way to Germanic tribespeople carving runes into rods made from beechwood.

Proto-slavic used the root "dn" (дн) for water, which explains river names such as Dnipro (Дніпро,Днепр), Danube (Дунай/Donau), Don (Дон), Dnjester (Днестр, Дністро).

The word "slogan" comes from a swedish word meaning "battle cry".

Buckaroo comes from the inability to pronounce/ the mispronunciation of the Spanish word for cowboy, Vaquero.

Admiral comes from Arabic "amīral". "Amir" means king, prince, chief, leader, and "al" is the definite article, in English "the" (compare algebra or alchemy).

So admiral means "leader of the", the Arabic for "leader of the sea", Amīr al-Baḥr, was too long to survive the whole game of telephone.

The word "standard," meaning "level of quality" or "rule" evolved from the physical battle flag on a pole, as in "standard bearer." So for things like standardized lengths of measurement, you could say "we follow the king's standard for what a foot is," which was a metaphor for following the king's rule on what that length was. That further stretched into a level of quality or conduct that needed to be achieved.

This might be obvious to some, but I only recently realized. A standard was originally a flag on a poll, meant to be visible across a battlefield as a direction for all to follow.

The British insult "tow rag" or "toe rag", referring to a contemptible and worthless person, is named after the nautical precusor to toilet paper:

Back in the days of sailing ships, the sailors did not have toilet paper. What they did have were rags. Cloth rags known as "tow". After having completed their daily evacuations, sailors would engage in ablutions using a rag. This rag was then tied to a rope and dragged behind the ship in order to clean it (or them).

https://snowbirdofparadise.com/2020/04/02/the-tow-rag-explained/

The abbreviation ‘lbs’ for ‘pounds’ comes from the Roman ‘libre pondo’ meaning ‘a pound by weight’.

This is also the reason the symbol for Libra in the zodiac is scales (Libra is the only sign represented by an inanimate object).

I just learnt this today, and I can’t believe I never noticed before now that ‘lbs’ for ‘pounds’ is weird. I always just mentally glossed over it.

Barbecue comes from Spanish barbacoa which comes from Taino language used in the Caribbean region. Natives there invented barbecue, the Spanish took it to the old continent and it spread from there.

Chocolate comes from náhuatl language used by Mexica people. Xocoatl, from xoco 'sour' y atl 'water'.

Coach (as in bus) comes from Hungarian kocsi. They invented a type of horse pulled carriage which later gave the name to the coaches we know from westerns and then to busses and cars. Coche (car in Spanish) has the same etymology.

Boondocks, meaning a remote place, entered English from the Tagalog word bundok, meaning mountain. American soldiers returning from occupying the Philippines introduced it in the early 20th century.

The word "tycoon" was brought into English from the Japanese word taikun (大君), one of the words for "lord." The Japanese word itself would have been brought over from China a long time before.

The "mast" in "mastodon" is the same one as in "mastectomy".

"The term "mastodon" comes from Greek roots: "mastos" meaning "breast" and "odon" meaning "tooth," referring to the nipple-like projections on the mammal's fossil molars. The name was coined by French naturalist Georges Cuvier in 1806."

In “room and board”, board refers to food coverage. The root is “bord” which is old English for table. But this word actually predates English, I believe from proto Germanic as it is also cognate in other Germanic languages. The only reason I learned this is because I’ve been learning Norwegian for several years, where table is “bord”.

Many things leap from the page when you learn a new language. For example, admittedly strange that this never dawned on me, but I simply never even considered that “maybe” is “may” and “be”. That is of course obvious, but it has always just been in my lexicon as the whole word and its meaning. When I realized the Norwegian “kanskje” was literally “kan” and “skje“ or “can happen” my mind was blown.