Quicksilver is one of the names of the element Mercury (Hg), also known as hydrargyrum, from the Greek hydr- (water) and argyros (silver). The word quicksilver comes from the Old English cwicseolfor, a calque of the Latin argentum vivum (cf. It. argento vivo),...
I have a strange auditory tic. Every time I see or hear the word 'counsellor', the massed choir of Handel's Messiah [if you are short of time, go directly to 2:45] floods my brain, specifically the chorus based on Isaiah 9:6: His name shall be called Wonderful,...
These days, everyone has a website. In certain cases it is not always clear why a company needs a website - not to mention a social networking presence - but the fact is that being behind the curve in web technology almost invariably loses you business. For most...
I have just finished Gyorgy Faludy's My Happy Days in Hell, recently republished as part of the excellent Penguin Central European Classics series. The translation was made by Kathleen Szasz in 1962, which is presumably why Penguin didn't think it was necessary to...
Ya que hemos publicado entradas recientemente acerca del napolitano y de las variantes del árabe, parece un buen momento para revisar algunos de los usos del término «dialecto» y tratar de descifrar a qué se refieren los lingüistas cuando lo utilizan. En primer lugar,...
Some words just sound nice. Sometimes this is because they describe something nice, like cafuné, a Brazilian Portuguese word which means to stroke someone's hair. Sometimes this is because they are satisfactory to say, like the Americanism tintinnabulation, which...
In his book On The Life and Death of Languages, linguist Claude Hagège talks about Pomo, an Amerindian language spoken in Northern California. This language has a verb which means 'to suddenly introduce words into a song that one was in the process of humming', and...
Followers of Perec abound. 'Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes...' This is the opening sentence of Walter Abish's Alphabetical Africa (1974). The first chapter is composed only of words that begin with 'a', the second of words that begin with 'a' or...
According to the historian John Julius Norwich, the most beautiful line in the entire Iliad comes in Book VII, after the single combat between Hector and Ajax; night is falling, and the herald Idaeus urges them to stop fighting: But night is already at hand; it is...
Shelta, Gammon or the Cant is (was) a form of slang used by gypsies in the British Isles. Among many other curious techniques to obscure the overt meaning of words, Shelta uses the same process of syllable inversion as Lunfardo: thus, mac, the Irish for son, becomes...