Tag Archives: Latin

The Spanish word for left

Posted 34 days ago by John Gray

Basque loanwords abound in contemporary Spanish. They include caspa, dandruff, manteca, lard (origin of mantequilla, butter), pestaña, eyelash (and now ‘tab’ in the sense of internet browser), and páramo, moorland, alongside many other less evocative terms. But I was particularly …

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The etymology of slave (and robot)

Posted 116 days ago by John Gray

The word slave comes from the Byzantine Greek σκλάβος, via Middle Latin Sclavus, from which root Italian gets schiavo, French esclave, and Spanish esclavo. The original meaning of the word was ‘Slav’, as in ‘Slavic’: apparently a certain Otto the …

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Myriad myriads

Posted 121 days ago by John Gray

Yesterday, in Mario Vargas Llosa’s La Fiesta del Chivo, I came across a word I didn’t know. It was: miríada. For my sins, I am accustomed to skipping over words that I don’t recognise, particularly in a long book like …

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Echar un polvo

Posted 220 days ago by John Gray

I have just come across a thrillingly imaginative bit of etymological scholarship, and I wanted to summarise it briefly for the non-Spanish-speakers among my readership. I was interested in the peninsular Spanish expression ‘(echar) un polvo’, which is broadly equivalent …

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Curious Constraints 2: the blameless bald

Posted 442 days ago by John Gray

Writing which responds to curious typographical constraints has a long and eccentric history. Hucbald (c. 850 – 930), Frankish monk and godfather of music theory, is best remembered (by those who remember such things) as the author of Ecloga de …

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