965: moist and must Jul 31, 2017

According to the BBC, the most unpopular word in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia is 'moist', so there is a good chance that many of you don't like the word; nevertheless, it does have an interesting etymology. The word ultimately comes from the Latin 'mucidus' meaning 'moldy', but it was also influenced by the word 'musteus' meaning ‘fresh’, even though those two ideas are not necessarily related. The word is also related to the noun 'must', both as it relates to grape juice and also dampness (but not the frenzied state of certain animals during mating-season). Concerning the former, 'must' meaning "grape juice before or during fermentation" comes from that same Latin word for 'fresh' while the other 'must', or to be more precise, 'musty' is thought to come from an alteration of the word 'moist', also influenced by the grape juice sense of 'must'. Despite that variety of words to which 'moist' is related, it should be noted that there is no connection between that word and 'mold' nor 'mist', which arguably have a more similar meaning to 'moist' that either of those aforementioned senses of 'must' in the way that people use them contemporarily.

964: Pronunciation of G in Old English Jul 30, 2017

Old English would look alien to anyone who speaks Modern English; partly this is because of the inflection—all the verbs were conjugated and all the nouns decline—and also the vocabulary was quite different. As Old English is a dead language however, pronunciation would not always be one of the reasons people may have difficulty learning it, but there were some significant differences. One way in which this differs is that G was pronounced /g/ such as in 'gum' today, but before certain vowels would become closer to /j/ as in 'yum' or 'yellow'. In Beowulf, one of the most famous Old English texts, the hero is Geatish, but while people now usually pronounce that /git/ (approximately 'geet') in Old English it would have been /jaət/ (approximately 'ya-ut').

963: Exceptions to Standard Sentence Formation in English Jul 29, 2017

Every language will have a lot of so called "rules", but so long as someone is understood, exceptions can appear. One feature of English that tends not to be too flexible is that word-order indicated the syntax of the word, so "the man bites the dog" means something different from "the dog bites the man. It is not usually possible to begin with a grammatical object before the verb like it is in languages that indicate this morphologically, such as Latin, but still there are a few exceptions, such as the colloquial phrase, "what say you?". Another feature is that prepositions are necessary to indicate motion to/from somewhere. If going to a store, or to a city, the word 'to' is necessary for example, but this isn't the case with the word 'home', as that is implied, as in "I'm going home" rather than "I'm going to home". Normally, the only words that do not need 'to' in this case are adverbs like 'out', 'here' or 'there', though it should be noted that if an article like 'the' or 'my' comes before 'home', the word 'to' needs to be included.

962: give (and PIE) Jul 28, 2017

Everything that it said about the theorized language of Proto-Indo-European is all based on comparing Indo-European languages that are studied now, both living and dead languages. Some linguists have noted a trend in which words meaning 'give' often are related to words meaning 'take' etymologically. Sometimes these words no longer have those meanings and the only reason we know of any relation is from historical documents, but there are also some more obvious ones. The word 'give' for example, is Germanic from a Scandinavian origin and is similar to other words that have the same meaning in Germanic languages, unsurprisingly. It is thought, however, to also be related to the Latin word 'habēre' meaning 'have' or 'hold'.

961: Language Extinction (Bungi) Jul 27, 2017

The most common reason that a language goes extinct is that it is seen as more sensible to teach children a language that is spoken by a large group of people as opposed to a regional language; doing so gives a person, potentially, more options financially. Nevertheless, sometimes people also abandon languages because it is not what is taught in schools, or because they face discrimination for using it. With Bungi for instance—a creole language of mostly Scots English with influence from Orcadian Scots, Scottish Gaelic, Cree and Ojibwe—now thought to be extinct, researchers found that the speakers were embarrassed to use it. The accent was noticeably different from Standard English, and they faced discrimination from English speakers, but also they were not intelligible to Cree or Ojibwe speakers. Most of the time, people opted to teach their children Standard English due to those problems, as well as the fact that it was a minority language and was not taught in schools, so not very practical outside of certain communities.

960: holy cow Jul 26, 2017

The expression "holy cow" is a fairly versatile one denoting surprise and alarm, but it has nothing to do with cows. It does, however, relate to 'holy', in a way, as, much like 'gadzooks' and other expressions, this was a way that people got around saying certain religious terms like 'G*d' or in this case 'Christ' in vain. Much like most of those other expressions relating to the supernatural in a euphemistic way that are used in English, this is from the Victorian Era, with the first documented use appearing in 1905, though it was likely used earlier in speech.

959: Limitations of the -or Suffix jul 25, 2017

For those who come across an unfamiliar word, especially those learning a new language, affixes can be quite helpful in figuring out what it means. The suffix '-er', for example, can be added to most verbs to make nouns meaning "agent of [verb]", except with some words like 'over' for which the ending was just coincidental; 'over' is also not a noun, so it wouldn't be an exception to that rule anyway. The suffix '-or' performs a similar function as '-er' in that it denotes someone who does whatever action was indicated with the verb. A person who creates is a 'creator' and someone who conducts is a 'conductor', but this process does not always go both ways, as a 'doctor' is not someone who 'docts' nor is a 'janitor' someone who janits. Theoretically, both of those aforementioned verbs could exist in English through back-formation, but because they both come from Latin words that look quite different from what they would now. To know that '-or' can be to verbs to indicate action or an occupation is not always as useful information without some other memorization of vocabulary and various grammar-conventions.

958: harlot Jul 24, 2017

Many of the words and swears that we use now connoting sex tend to relate more to women than men. This happened in Old English to possibly even greater an extent, as many word that related to promiscuity and seduction as well tended to be feminine grammatically, though the significance of this is debatable. The word 'harlot' today is used as an insult or a somewhat dated synonym to 'prostitute', almost always if not entirely directed at women. This wasn't always the case however, and in Middle English the word denoted a vagabond or lecher, and would be used to refer to a man or a woman. In fact, the word originates from the Old French 'harlot' meaning a '(poor) young man' specifically.

957: Whore and Ho Jul 23, 2017

The word 'whore' has been around for over a thousand years at least, while 'ho' is somewhat newer. 'Ho' was not commonly recognized in dictionaries until the 1960's, but people have been using it for centuries; it's estimated that people used 'ho' more than twice as often in the 1860's as they do now. Much like English has two distinct forms for 'curse' and 'cuss', as well as 'arse' and 'ass' which mean the same things but belong to different dialects, 'whore' and 'ho' originally differed based on the accent of the people saying the word, depending on whether the R's are rhotic or not. Now, as 'ho' is considered a slang term that's separate from 'whore', it is used by people who speak Standard American English who would otherwise ordinarily say 'whore; oppositely, speakers of Received Pronunciation in Southern England may say 'whore' with a rhotic R. In America, the term 'ho' is often associated with African American English, and this is because that dialects also uses a non-rhotic R.

956: Mistakes from Convention Jul 22, 2017

Even if people understand how to speak a language, like English, fluently, there is no guarantee that every rule or convention will be followed in certain circumstances. It is indeed quite common for people to misuse 'is' or 'are' depending on if a singular or plural noun or pronoun comes right before it when it the two don't agree, such as the example invented here, "the messages he sent is scandalous" even though 'messages' is plural. Generally these happen in longer, more complicated clauses. People also do this sort of thing quite often putting 'me' at the end of a sentence or clause when it is a subject, and therefore would be 'I'. Much of those two issues arise from people trying to follow convention, rather than simply the grammar; it is after all strange to hear a sentence end with 'I'. It is also due to convention that 'they' takes 'are' as the form of the verb 'to be' when used as a singular, and has done for as long as people have been using that pronoun as singular, instead of 'is' in Standard American English, and most other dialects.

955: Plural Words Treated as Singular Jul 21, 2017

English does not have much conjugation in the same way that some other languages do that add affixes to every verb to indicate the subject thereof. In the present tense, the only conjugation is that 3rd person singular verbs get an S at the end. This is fairly simple when using pronouns and most nouns, but there are a few words where the form of the noun does not agree with the verb, such as 'physics' which is plural in form, but treated as a singular, as in "physics is interesting" rather that "physics are interesting", though both would probably be understandable. In general, the singular form of a verb is used for when discussing exactly one of a countable item, or things that can't be counted, like "milk"; the latter variety can appear as plural when discussing types of something, such as "two fishes" i.e. species of fish. 'Physics' on the other hand is a field made up of different branches, but while the branches are countable, hypothetically at least, people tend to view it (notably not "them") as a single mass-noun in the way 'milk' may be, and treat it as a singular. Names for academic subjects are not the only sorts of words for which this occurs, but it is quite common for that to happen.

954: Pronunciations of C (cinematography) Jul 20, 2017

In English orthography, the letter C can represent the sound /k/ as in 'character' and 'car' but can also represent /s/ as in 'charade', 'Caesar', 'cemetery', or 'cinematograph'. The reason for this is that English spelling is just as much of a blend of conventions from other languages as is the make-up of its vocabulary. In the case of 'Caesar', which is taken directly from Latin as a family-name, the C was originally pronounced /k/ just like the German 'Kaiser'. There will be more on that later. In the case of 'cemetery' and 'cinematograph', the words are originally of Greek origin, a language for which people use a different alphabet. When transcribing Greek now for English-speakers, people will use the letter K, but in the orthography for Latin and French, the languages through which English obtained 'cemetery' and 'cinematograph' respectively, there is no K, so people used C, and over time began to pronounce the C as /s/. The origin of 'cinema' is from the Greek participle 'kinema' meaning 'movement', so the C it has now is not completely arbitrary, historically and etymologically speaking.

953: -aholic and -iversary (New Suffixes) Jul 19, 2017

English has a lot of suffixes, but most of those haven't changed much in centuries, and rarely are new ones used. Certain lexical classes like nouns, verbs, and adjectives etc. tend to gain the most new words while it is uncommon for new words to be added to others, like conjunctions and articles because they tend to relate to syntax but not the semantics of what someone is trying to communicate. Affixes, though not a part of speech, also are not created often because they tend to be used to communicate something more about syntax as well. The suffix '-(a)holic', however, is not only used to indicate that, for example, a part of speech in the way that '-ness' indicates that a word that was once an adjective is a noun; instead it also relates to the idea of addiction, as in 'workaholic' or 'chocoholic' (though not cat-holic, yet). The suffix was taken from 'alcoholic', even though the only suffix in that word is '-ic' added to 'alcohol', making it a new affix. This is not the only new suffix in English, such as '-iversary' drawn from 'anniversary', as in 'adoptiversary', a recent trend on Twitter which communicates the anniversary of something, in this case pet-adoption. It should be noted that these could perhaps be considered combining forms instead of suffixes because they add semantic meaning.

Comment if you have any others that you have found yourself.

952: Derivatives of Facere Jul 18, 2017

There are a number of reasons why a pair of etymologically related words might not look similar. One common reason is that at one point a word entered English from another language like Old French, and then perhaps even centuries later another related word was borrowed into English, but by that point some word in either language changed, given that languages do not evolve in the same ways or at the same times. Another common reason might be that the two words are from similar languages, such as Latin or French, but sound and appear different from the same cause as before. Both of these can be used to describe certain derivatives of the Latin verb 'facere' meaning 'to make' or 'to do'. Many of the words we have now as derivatives, like 'effect' or 'counterfeit', came via Old French whereas 'efficient', a word closely related to 'effect', was taken straight from Latin, but was modified somewhat for use in English. 'Factotum', on the other hand, was taken directly from Latin but was left unchanged, though 'fact' and 'factory', while still visually and phonetically similar, entered English slightly earlier and were changed more.

951: big apple Jul 17, 2017

The nickname 'big apple' as a reference for New York City for a long time had no clear origin, but did have a great amount of folk-etymology surrounding it. More recently, etymologists agree on having found an answer. The first recorded use of the phrase was in 1909 from Edward Martin "Kansas is apt to see in New York a greedy city… It inclines to think that the big apple gets a disproportionate share of the national sap…". Here, and in other instances following this, the association of the city to big apples is thought to be from the idea that things were especially big, both in terms of grandeur but also that there was a lot of money in the area. Though the moniker faded out of use in the 1960's, it was brought back in a tourism-campaign in the 1970's, not to showcase wealth, but to give the impression of cleanliness and brightness to counter the popular image that the city was dirty.

950: octothorp Jul 16, 2017

The symbol # goes by a number of names including 'number-sign', and 'pound-sign' on account of its being used to indicate numbers and weights, and 'hash' which is related to 'hatch', the name for artistic shading by drawing a series of intersecting lines. The technical name for this is 'octothorpe' or 'octothorp', but the origins of the name are somewhat uncertain. The combining form 'octo-' means 'eight' in reference to the points around the symbol, but the '-thorpe' is less clear. It is thought to be from the surname 'Thorpe', though no one knows why definitively. Some have speculated that this is from the name of someone who worked at a telephone company, while others believe that there is some relation to the athlete Jim Thorpe. Some have claimed that the second element instead derives from the Old English 'thorp' used in the names of British villages, but this is unlikely the case.

949: jacket Jul 15, 2017

There are plenty of English words with historically French diminutive suffixes that don't necessarily convey things being small anymore, like 'pocket', though some, like 'cygnet', still do. Included on that list is also 'budget' and 'ballet, all of which posses '-et' at the end. It can be fun and enlightening to look into other words that have that '-et' as an ending, though technically not a suffix anymore. Another such word is 'jacket' which, like the other words above, does not have an obvious relation to what is left when the historical suffix is removed, in this case 'jack'. Here however, consider that the word is from French, where there is a name like 'Jack' but spelt instead, 'Jacque'. This was not only a name though, but also a nickname the nobility gave to poor people, which also gave English 'jacquerie'. 'Jacket' was a diminutive used to describe short tunics that peasants or sometimes foot-soldiers wore.

948: wink, wince, and vacillate Jul 14, 2017

Any time you are trying to learn a foreign language, false cognates, i.e. words that look as though they are related but are not, can be quite a nuisance. For English speakers, cognates can make it much easier to understand the words of languages like French or German because there is so much shared vocabulary and similar linguistic history, but some terms, like the German verb 'winken' meaning 'to wave' and not 'to wink' (which would be 'blinzeln') might be confusing. In this case however, 'wink' comes from the Old English 'wincian' which is related to 'winken', and also the English word 'wince'. That word that is not Germanic, and originates from the Old French 'guenchir' (turn aside') and in Middle English meant, 'kick restlessly'. This Romantic connection also extends to the word 'vacillate' which now means to change opinions often, but initially meant just to sway in a physical sense. It would be misleading perhaps then to call 'winken' a false cognate, as there are etymological relations, but that is not especially useful for someone who just wants to learn another language.

947: Whom Jul 13, 2017

To whom will it matter if the word 'whom' stops being used?

In Old English and, to a far lesser extent, Middle English, grammatical cases that indicate the syntax of a word with suffixes were used consistently for pretty much all nouns and pronouns, but this eventually disappeared with the exception of some pronouns like 'I' and 'me', or 'he' and 'him'. Native speakers of English can tell the different ways the word 'she' as opposed to 'her' would be used for the most part, even if they could not articulate the precise reasoning as for why; as a sidetone, third-person pronouns are also the only real remnant of grammatical gender as well. In the case of 'whom' however, though it is used to indicate that it is an object of a verb in the same way as 'him' would be, it is not used with the same concern or frequency, and people would be just as likely to understand "who were you talking to" as "whom were you talking to". This issue however is not likely to result in the disappearance of 'whom' in any immediate way, as it has been noted that the usage of whom is not significantly different than it was in the late 16th century. On the other hand, prescriptive grammarians in the 19th century who gave rules such to not end a clause with a preposition, while having little success in general at managing the manner in which people speak, might have done 'whom' a disservice when they said had to be used as an object instead of 'who'. By making the word seem overly formal, and perhaps making people worried about embarrassing themselves using it in the wrong situations, it tends to be used only formally or literarily.

946: Myneralls, and Inconsistent Spelling Jul 12, 2017

In many ways, Middle English spelling was a better indicator of the way in which people actually spoke than Modern English spelling, now standardized. Standards for spelling were only beginning to matter the way they do today, but even by a single author, there was not necessarily consistent spelling-habits. In The Charter of Massachusetts Bay: 1629 (link to the full text here), what would now be 'minerals' is spelt four different ways: in order of most common to least common 'Myneralls' (5 times), 'Mynerals' (2 times), 'Mineralls' (1 time), and 'Mvneralls' (1 time). Indeed, "and Myneralls...ind Mvneralls" which conceptually the same pair of two words is written two different ways in the same sentence. At this period in English, there had been some significant sound-shifts that had eventually resulted in Early Modern English, but the form of the language was still fairly new and fairly inconsistent for many people. The spelling, however, does give some insight into the manner people pronounced things, something not so easy determined with English currently. It should be noted that all of the nouns are capitalized, as is still the practice in Modern German.