The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

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Cratylus, etymology involves a claim about the underlying semantic content of the name, what it really means or indicates.

That's our aim with every book, of course, but when all the component parts come together in just the right way, the results speak for themselves.It is also strange to think that two thousand years ago people thought that there was a correct day of the week to be in love, as though from Saturday to Thursday you might be quite icy and indifferent and then suddenly perk up on the day of Venus. There were those who said that the flying saucers were, in fact, clouds, or very distant mountain tops, or very near drops of water on the windows of Mr Arnold's own aircraft, or pelicans. I’ve often wondered if khaki (which the OED defines as dust coloured, brownish yellow) also comes in a roundabout way from excrement? Three days before Christmas, this little book that looks at the origins of the word testicles and examines why Thomas Crapper's surname has become slang for number twos, reached No 1. And from there it got dragged off into the world of advertising, where it has become debased and familiar.

The Etymologicon springs from Mark Forsyth's Inky Fool blog on the strange connections between words. The Heathway element refers to the road that leads to Becontree Heath - with 'Heath' meaning a tract of wasteland, and 'Way' being the road. Etymologicum Magnum Genuinum, Symeonis Etymologicum una cum Magna Grammatica, Etymologicum Magnum Auctum, vol.

Definitions and other text are available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. So many authors try to make a serious academic subject funny, but few succeed as admirably as Mark Forsyth. Don't forget your bumbershoot: This lively book digs up the wonderfully colourful English vocabulary that has disappeared from daily use". It is the largest Byzantine lexicon and draws on many earlier grammatical, lexical and rhetorical works. Etymologicum Magnum ( Ancient Greek: Ἐτυμολογικὸν Μέγα, Ἐtymologikὸn Mέga) (standard abbreviation EM, or Etym.

The Etymologicon swiftly picked up positive early press, not just in the broadsheets but also the nation's leading tabloid. Old English lufian "to love, cherish, show love to; delight in, approve," from Proto-Germanic *lubojan (cognates: Old High German lubon, German lieben), from root of love (n.Much as I have tried, I've never succeeded in eliciting anything other than barely-patient looks when I've launched into "did you know that 'salary' comes from a word meaning 'salt'?

M. in older literature) is the traditional title of a Greek lexical encyclopedia compiled at Constantinople by an unknown lexicographer around 1150 AD. When ink-stained etymologists are being jetted around the world and interviewed on television you know that something has gone horribly, horribly awry. This blog post will not answer the great question as to whether extraterrestrial life visits earth, because, though I know the answer, I'm not telling. The important thing here is that the seven-day week spread through the Roman Empire before Christianity did. In philology"love of learning; love of words or discourse," apology, doxology, analogy, trilogy, etc.

Of his book Horologicon, Forsyth said: It is for the words too beautiful to live long, too amusing to be taken seriously, too precise to become common, too vulgar to survive polite society, or too poetic to thrive in the age of prose. R. Reitzenstein (1897), Geschichte der griechischen Etymologika: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Philologie in Alexandria und Byzanz (Leipzig; repr. I would give this book a higher rating, but where the author clearly thought he was being cute and light by skipping from story to story with a kind of "before and after" narrative skein, it ended up being more exhausting than amusing. Some people, rather foolishly, think that seven days is a quarter of the lunar cycle: seven days from new moon to half full, another week to full, another week waning to half, and another week until it disappears. This got shortened to buff leather, and hence you buff something up, until it looks beautiful and shiny.