Agreed. When my daughter was small and we were out and about, she would sometimes ask me to carry something for her because she was tired or needed her hands free for some other purpose. And on more than one occasion, someone exclaim "What a cute hand bag!" To which I felt the best response was to a...

Interesting that the modern English word "kaput" meaning "defeated, destroyed, broken" and generally thought to be taken from German also traces (and preserves) its etymology back to this same PIE root.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/kaput

Is there an etymological connection between the no-longer-productive English diminutive -kin discussed here and the quite-productive German suffix -chen seen in words such as Ma[umlaut]chen (young woman), Bro[umlaut]chen (bread roll) and Ma[umlaut]rchen (folktale, fairy tale). (Adding the suffix -ch...

In fact in the text collected by the optical scanner and shown to us by the ngram viewer at the link, it is clearly the elongated 's' (looks a lot like the integral sign as used in calculus) but I used the 'f' to try to capture the appearance of the original text. In retrospect, the was not a good d...

You may thank the ngram viewer for all the quotes. As I mentioned the software sometimes has difficulty interpreting squiggles detected by the optical scanner (i.e.sometimes interpreting the old style elongaged "s" as an "f." The reverse error also occurs.) I suggest you have a look at it sometime. ...

The n-gram view offers some assistance here. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=swither%2Cdither&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cswither%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cdither%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2Cswither%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cdither%3B%2Cc0 "Swither" had a little...

As we start into the final quarter of 2019, articles on words that became prominent in 2019 have started to appear. Here is a link to one such list in The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/oct/14/cancelled-for-sadfishing-the-top-10-words-of-2019 Note "pronoun." I posted about this de...

Here it is "in use" in Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. The poem, "Song of the Banner at Daybreak," is from around 1860. ". . . The Continent, devoting the whole identity without reserving an atom, Pour in! whelm that which asks, which sings, with all and the yield of all, Fusing and holding, claimin...

Using the ngram viewer, "Palmares" is usually capitalized and is a place name for various locations. Often it refers to an independent (or semi-independent) state in Brazil founded by rebel slaves (a "quilombo"). It was first organized in the middle of the 16th century. The term is also used in bota...

PIE *per- also shows up in words like periscope, perigee and, surprisingly, in the name of the great Greek statesman, Pericles.

Merriam-Webster defines "anacoluthon" as "syntactical inconsistency or incoherence within a sentence" while the Wikipedia entry says "[it] is an unexpected discontinuity in the expression of ideas within a sentence, leading to a form of words in which there is logical incoherence of thought." In the...

Are the following anacoluthons? (Examples of Garden-path sentences from Wikipedia)

1) The horse raced past the barn fell.
2) The old man the boat.
3) The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families.

According to Wikipedia, English loan words from indigenous languages of the Americas, Narragansett (or the language spoken by the Narragansett) was an Algonquian language, one of the most widely spread of the indigenous language families in North America. The Algonquian languages are polysynthetic s...

The article says "Inside a small wooden hut, she teaches the 112 sounds including 45 distinct clicks of N|uu with the local children." And a little further down the article, there is a link of a video with her speaking Nluu and you can hear clicks almost from the first word in the video Here are lin...

barbecue/barbeque - I like the second; it is nicely abbreviated bbq doughnut/donut - the former mike (microphone)/mic - the former fair (market)/fayre* - the former; the latter is ok in contexts in which one would also use "ye" and "olde" fare (food)/fayre* - Have I seen the latter? May in the same ...