925: pussy Jun 21, 2017

If your mind is dirty enough, there are plenty of words that look like they should be related to a swear or something sexual, but this isn't always the case. To answer a fan-question, 'pusillanimous' meaning "lacking courage" doesn't have an apparent connection to the word 'pussy', even though that too can also be an insult for someone timid. The former term is from Latin via Greek meaning 'small mind', related to 'animus', whereas the latter term is Germanic, among other reasons. That does not mean however that there aren't other modern words that have some sort of etymological connection. 'Pussy', which is used in many senses including 'cat' and 'vagina' comes from an Old English word 'pusa' meaning 'bag', related to the Old Norse for 'pocket' though not the English word 'purse'. The word is also related to the Low German for 'vulva', though early uses in English did not gain the sense of 'pudenda' for a while, because even before that, the word referred to cats. In a fairly general sense, the word went from meaning a small purse to then simply a small soft thing; then it went to mean 'cat' and eventually also 'vagina'. Coincidentally, the French word 'chat' foremost refers to the animal, but as slang also does denote a woman's genitals.

If you have any of your own questions that you'd like answered, please feel free to write a direct message or simply put it in the comments.

924: Hyphens Jun 20, 2017

Those writing in English use very few hyphens even if it could make things a great deal clearer. Even though they may not be included in writing, there is a difference in speech where they could be present. For example, a native speaker of English would use a different intonation for "I'm in a car" versus "I'm in a car-park", though the change is subtle. Hyphens, just like any other type of punctuation, aren't technically pronounced, so the only reason to use them instead of combining the words together, as happens for German words, is convention, though there some exceptions like 'busstop'. The effect of hyphenated pairs becomes more appararent in German as well, and there's no better example than with the word 'eierstock'. That term meaning 'ovaries' but is masculine in gender, because while 'ei' is neuter, it is only the last element that dictates the syntax. While English doesn't have grammatical gender, but for pluralization, for example, 'car' in 'car-parks' is not declined, since just like an adjective in English, there is no modification regardless of syntax.

923: cootie Jun 19, 2017

In the U.S., it's common for young children to get lice-checks in school periodically, or when one student gets head-lice. Those same kids, however, would not get cootie-checks, partly because children already know that half the population have them anyway, so the thought is: "why bother?" but also—and more importantly—because they are a fictional germ. The term 'cootie' however can be used in more serious circumstances to mean 'body-lice', though people tend to opt for that term rather than 'cooties'. The word itself derives from the Malay 'kutu' which was the name for a parasitic insect, and was adopted into English during the first world war.

922: Words for Meats Jun 18, 2017

There are a number of words in English that denote the meat of an animal separate to the word for the animal itself, including 'pork' and 'beef' as opposed to 'pig' and 'cow' respectively. This is because the names for the food came from Old French whereas the names for the animals are Germanic. To a native English speaker this might seem typical, but compared to most other languages this is quite rare; most of the time, the word for a food and the word for an animal are the same. This happens in English with 'chicken' and kinds of fish however, so the idea should be understandable. In those cases where the two words are the same, the meaning may be discerned not only from context but from grammar, which all native speakers will know subconsciously. In the sentence, "I like chicken", food doesn't even need to be mentioned at all, but because it has no article and is singular people would know this 'chicken' is for food. This also holds in cases where the animals aren't commonly eaten, so "I like dog" is understood to mean 'dog-meat'. Luckily with 'sheep' where the singular form is the same as the plural, we don't have this confusion since there is the word 'mutton'.

921: Hypothesis versus Hypothetical (Lexical Classes) Jun 17, 2017

In general, a word's derivatives make it very easy for a speaker to apply one sort of concept throughout different parts of speech, also called 'lexical classes'. Some words, though theoretically all words, can be used in different contexts in English to change the part of speech to which it belongs without affixes or anything else e.g. 'water' in 'I drink water' and 'I water the plants is acting as a noun and verb respectively. Much of the time, either for clarity or tradition, speakers will modify a word to convey the same sort of concept but within lexical classes, such as with 'analysis', a noun, 'analyze', a verb, and 'analytical', an adjective. In a few instances, the derivatives have changed meanings however, so while 'hypothesis' and 'hypothesize' both relate to the explanation of something based on minimal evidence usually in regard to research, 'hypothetical' and 'hypothetically' are used in a less formal way to mean anything possibly true but not necessarily, and would not relate to some kind of proposed analysis. To be especially clear in this case, one could opt to say 'by hypothesis', because in this case the derivative has gained an additional and slightly conflicting sense. 

920: Non-standard Word Order Jun 16, 2017

Word order in any language tends to be presented just as a three-letter code denoting where the grammatical subject, object, and main verb are placed. This makes sense for English, classified as SVO, as, for the most part, the position of a word in a sentence determines its function almost entirely. In other languages like Latin, the grammatical meaning is identified by endings on words, so there could theoretically be any order to the sentence, but it is nevertheless classified as SOV. It is not a rule, in any way that word may be regarded, that a sentence in a given language must be in a particular word order, so this based off of convention. For that reason, a sentence like "that I know well" is in OSV, one of the least common standard word orders for any language and may possibly be rarer than "I know that well" but is still understandable and used in regular speech largely thanks to the pronoun 'I' which is only used for the subject. Non-standard word order can also sometimes be attributed to other languages a user may speak.

919: Misused Plurals Jun 15, 2017

The post yesterday was concerned with the different sorts of plurals that people use in English, but there are still a number of plurals that people don't use (at least not often). There are plenty of originally Italian terms ending in '-i' that have made their way into English, such as 'spaghetti', 'graffiti', 'paparazzi', and 'cannoli' which people almost always use as singulars. It doesn't help that some of those may be thought of as a collective in the same way that people talk about hair in the singular, though certainly 'cannoli' does not belong to that group. Other words that are more common as plurals like 'lice' are sometimes also confused as singulars (instead of in this case 'louse'), so it isn't only with loan-words either. You could say that ordering one cannoli is a faux pas, but be careful, as doing that a second time would result in plural 'faux pas' being pronounced the same, and not that you made two /fō ˈpäz/.

918: Uncommon Pluralizations Jun 14, 2017

As far as pluralization goes, English makes the process far easier than some other languages. Since there is no gender, the plural of a word only needs to have one form, and unlike in German where words are commonly pluralized with '-en', '-er', '-e', or by some internal-modification, even without any need for more differentiation, English tends to use just '-s'. There are a few regular exceptions to this. First, there are words that are pluralized by modifying the ending in a more complicated way that with merely a suffix, for example those ending in '-um' or '-on' that are pluralized by dropping that ending and adding an '-a' such as with 'flagellum' to 'flagella' or 'criterion' to 'criteria'. These, however, are all borrowed from from other languages and aren't very common; moreover, it could probably be understandable if someone said 'flagellums'. There are also a few historical methods of pluralizing that are not borrowed, such as adding '-en' to 'ox to make 'oxen', but also there are some nouns that are pluralized by internal modification, as with 'man' to 'men', but these are rare.

917: de- Jun 13, 2017

English is a Germanic language but takes a lot of the vocabulary from Romance languages due to its somewhat complicated history. This lexicon is not only appears in whole words but many times from affixes as well. There are plenty of words that historically had Latinate prefixes that are now not removable, but plenty still operate as prefixes. Either as a prefix, like with the word 'decry' but also just as part of the word, such as with 'descend' and 'decline', 'de-' appears in a lot of different terms but does not have the same function for each. In these and other words with 'de-', either as a historical prefix or as a current prefix, it does not always indicate the same thing; there are some examples that relate in some way to going down and others meaning 'removal of'. In Latin this difference would have been very clear, as there was a prefix 'des-' which usually appears in English as 'dis-' as in 'disrespect' denoting 'lack of' while there was a separate preposition 'de' that could mean 'from', giving English all of the words now indicating a downwards direction.

916: honky and hungarian Jun 12, 2017

Unfortunately, there are a lot of racial slurs used in English and pretty much every other language, though according the the anti-discrimination paradigm this won't change until people's views change, or until the particular word changes meaning. We see this with the word 'honky' and its predecessor 'Hunky' which referred to white people, specifically from Central or Eastern Europe. Now the word is much less common than it used to be, as opinions have shifted, but it still appears in word 'honky-tonk' which is at most a distant relation in terms of its current meaning. Similar to how the opinion of Slavs by Western Europeans was pretty bad as indicated by the name (learn more by clicking the link), 'Hunky' came from an alteration of the word 'Hungarian'. The word 'Hungarian' isn't even what the Hungarians call themselves either; the word for Hungary in Hungarian is 'Magyar'. Like many names for European countries in English, the reason for the difference between the native name for the area and the English ones is from Latin. Just like how the name for the Belgian Walloons came from the name for a single Gaulish tribe in the region whom the Romans encountered, 'Hungary' comes from the word 'hun' ruled by Attila in the 5th century.

915: Dialects and Languages Jun 11, 2017

The sociolinguist Max Weinreich popularized the phrase, "a language is a dialect with an army and navy" and people have been quoting it ever since. Other than that, there is not much of any consensus about what makes a dialect and what makes a language; maybe there will be one day, but it can take a long time to definitively pin down ideas that seem quite simple, much like how the form for a syllable, in any scientific way, was only defined in the 1980's. In general, dialects of a language tend to be considered anything with mostly similar grammar and vocabulary, that may have different pronunciations, syntax, and some different lexicon while being intelligible to those who know another dialect, but that can itself be hard to determine. There are, for example, some dialects of English, like those spoken in Scotland or the Appalachians that evolved somewhat differently and might be unintelligible to someone who knows English from New York, but these are considered dialects. On the other hand, Swedish and Norwegian, and also Danish though to a lesser extent, are considered different languages, but aside from different spelling-standards and some different pronunciation, these are pretty much mutually intelligible. 

914: Muslim as a Demonym Jun 10, 2017

Almost every demonym or other adjective used to denote a people involve either a suffix like '-ish' and '-ian', or are strong nouns like 'Greek' from 'Greece'. There are some few exceptions, such as 'Muslim' that comes from the word 'Islam'. In English there are fewer prefixes that are used in general compared to suffixes, and far fewer than there are in some other languages like Hungarian. Arabic, and other semitic languages like Hebrew on the other hand don't have root words in the way that Indo-European ones to which affixes are added but use templates into which usually vowels are added to provide grammatical meaning. Nevertheless, in general M is a common way to make something into a demonym, so 'Islam' would become 'Mislam' (Muslim). In kiSwahili, a Bantu language with a great deal of Arabic influence, and 'Marekani' ('America') becomes 'Mmarekani' (American) as well.

913: -drome Jun 9, 2017

Most suffixes, like '-ness' and most other derivational suffixes for example, can be found at the end of words without any similarity in meaning, even though they are syntactically similar. Combining forms on the other hand do have an impact on the meaning of the word, such as 'Austro-' as a prefix or '-crat' as a suffix. With that in mind, it might be confusing to look as the '-drome' in 'aerodrome' ('airdrome') or 'palindrome', for while the meanings are not apparently related, removing the ending of those words would leave 'aero-' and 'palin' which are not words on their own, as would be the case were it a suffix. You might assume also that the ending is completely coincidental, as does sometimes happen, but this is not what the element is considered to be. '-drome' is said to be a combining form simply for the reason that it adds semantic meaning; it denotes the idea of running or of courses like that at an aerodrome ('airport') or velodrome coming from the Greek 'dromos' meaning ‘running’ on a track, and likewise 'palindrome' is something that runs, so to speak, again. It should be noted that 'aero-' is also a combining for, but 'air' is not.

912: hoist and heist Jun 8, 2017

While normally the word lift means to pick up or raise in a general way, informally the word means 'to steal'. Although the exact word that became slang was fairly arbitrary, and might as well have been 'raise', the connotation lifting something up, and lifting something off of, say, a shelf in a store is fairly reasonable. Somewhat similarly, the word 'heist' evolved only recently in the mid 19th century from 'hoist'. 'Heist' does not have the double-meaning that 'lift' does, but that was only a matter of luck. Not only was 'heist' an alteration of 'hoist', but 'hoist' was originally an alteration of the verb 'hoise'. In that way, while 'hoist' now is a verb and a noun, in the famous line "hoist by his own petard" it is a participle, and could have been 'hoised'.

911: European Languages in the Americas Jun 7, 2017

There are many native languages spoken in the Americas—somewhere around a thousand—though most have a fairly low amount of speakers, and only four are deemed non-endangered depending upon the source. The vast majority of people predominantly use a European language like English, Spanish, Portuguese, or French, along with a plethora of creoles from those languages. Some European language that might be associated less with the Americas than those others mentioned above might be Russian and Danish. Russian is spoken by a small number of people in Alaska who tend to be descendants of those whom originally colonized the region; the dialect uses a lot of archaic Russian vocabulary, so people call it Old Russian, and has various influences from the native Aleut or Yupik. Perhaps fittingly, most of the speakers of Old Russian now are elderly, and there aren't many of them. Danish on the other hand is spoken widely in Greenland, which is still a Danish colony. Nevertheless, the total population of Greenland is only around 56,000, so needless to say, neither Russian nor Danish speaker make up a sizeable amount of the population of the Americas. 

910: Guugu Yimithirr's Lack of Relative Positions Jun 6, 2017

There are many aspects to language, particularly in vocabulary that are fairly consistent from language to language. Even if an idea that can be expressed with a single word in one language has to be composed of two or more, theoretically it should be the case that anyone can say anything no matter what. In the case of the Australian language Guugu Yimithirr, as just one example, not everything is so simple. Its claim to fame, so to speak, is that there is no term for 'left' or 'right', and instead the people use the cardinal points North, South, East, and West. Children have to learn the concepts of left and right at a young age anyway, but just as how an English-speaking adult could identify where left is regardless of location, the speakers of Guugu Yimithirr could identify North even when spun around or in a windowless room. In memory as well people can recount cardinal direction in the same way an English speaker could remember relative position. Either way, it just takes training and practice in early childhood and beyond in order to master either relative positions or cardinal directions. 

909: Inuits have 50 Words for 'Snow' (A Myth) Jun 5, 2017

There is something of a myth surrounding the claim that Eskimos, more commonly now called Inuit-Yupik peoples have so many words for different kinds of snow. Depending upon where you may look, this number can range from 50 words to a couple hundred, but this misconception that began with Franz Boas is incorrect for two reasons. First, there is not a single language that the peoples from the arctic speak, with the Inuit-Yupik languages referring to three language-families, each with different languages that make them up, so to make the claim about the vocabulary as if it were consistent for all of the many languages in this group would be a huge generalization. Second, it does not take into account the structure of these languages and the way words are formed therein. In Inuit-Yupik languages, incredibly long words are made by placing many affixes all around a single root word such that theoretically a word can be a whole clause by itself. Due to the highly synthetic nature of these languages, what would require adjectives or gerunds in English, such as to say 'drifting sea-ice' is one word in these other languages, making it seem like there are more ways to express the same idea when in fact it comes down to nothing more than syntax.

908: guerilla Jun 4, 2017

Guerilla tactics have been used in wars for thousands of years, but the word that we use in English is fairly modern. Historically the name for guerillas has varied from place to place, and from perspective, i.e. one side might say 'freedom-fighter' and the other say 'rebel'. 'Guerilla' itself comes directly from the Spanish word that became fairly well known during the Peninsula War against Napoleon in which the Iberians lost but citizens continued fighting with small, informal assaults. The word recognizes that scale as well, as it is the diminutive of the Spanish 'guerra' meaning 'war'. There are quite a number of related words, either within one language or between two that differ only on the G or W, like with 'wage' and 'gage'.

907: Problems with Studying Language through Culture Jun 3, 2017

Language is a fine tool as a way to study some aspects of culture, but when people rely on language too much to do so it leads to problems. An example of this is with a study done in 1901 by Dr. W.H.R Rivers who was an anthropologist, neurologist, and ethnologist, but when he wrote the paper Primitive Color Vision in which he studies a group living on islands in the Torres Strait, he analyzed language. In this article on a people whom have only three words for colors—what would translate to 'black', 'white', and 'red'—he wrote, “the ground of the development of their color language corresponds with the order in which they would be placed on the ground of their general intellectual and cultural development” essentially claiming that these people were less intellectually evolved than others; some people have also made similar claims on the basis of word-order. This is certainly a racist point of view, but works now as a lesson that researchers today should not assess language as a reflection of any people, individuals or as a group.

906: Cyrillic and Cuneiform Jun 2, 2017

There are a great number of alphabets from all over the world, all with different names. Some names for writing systems, perhaps most, come from the name of the language for which they were intended to be used, such as Arabic or Georgian. Also, 'Cyrillic' is used for many languages, generally Slavic ones, names after St. Cyril who invented it based off of the Greek alphabet to better fit Slavonic; part of the reason for that was that most of the initial uses were ecclesiastical, so the East Orthodox church would have wanted to be closer to the Greek Orthodox church rather than the Catholic church. Cuneiform got its name, deriving from the Latin, 'cuneus' meaning 'wedge' not from the language not the creator, but because of the wedge-shaped marks that make up the individual characters. People writing in this system pressed a tool into clay, with different orientations and combinations.