Brit Slang

The Best of British – The American’s guide to speaking British

This link has a nice — though I’m certain not complete by any means — list of British slang terms.

 

Is being pregnant embarrassing?

When learning Spanish from English (and, I’m sure, other languages), one finds out that many words are cognates, nearly the same (international, internacional), but that there are some “false cognates” that will mess you up (soap, sopa = soup). A famous false cognate is embarrass vs. embarazar, the latter meaning “to get pregnant.” There is a famous story of the Parker Pen company advertising in Spanish that their superior writing utensil wouldn’t leak in your pocket and get you pregnant. For more screwups in the world of translated advertising, check out this link.

But the more interesting question, once the prurient chuckles have died away, is WHY these two words are so similar — they are obviously connected etymologically — and yet have such divergent meanings. Is it, as my exchange student friends in Mexico and I speculated, that it is simply embarrassing to be pregnant? The problem is, that doesn’t explain why the Spanish word isn’t used more broadly to describe embarrassment.

Well, here’s what I’ve found from dictionary.com, including particularly the online etymological dictionary, and from the Real Academia’s dictionary, and from WordReference.com’s hidden but very workable Spanish to Spanish dictionary.

The first definition (historically, I’m sure, since it’s not the most common use) of embarazo in Spanish is “obstacle, impediment,” the second being “state of being pregnant.” The original sense of embarrass in English, up until 1828, was to “perplex, or throw into doubt” which further derives directly from “obstacle” and “to block, to bar.” It’s easy enough to see how we could be embarrassed (modern sense) by someone or something blocking us or perplexing us (original sense). So all that remains is to connect being pregnant with being blocked or obstructed. I don’t want to assume it’s as simple as a baby growing inside you is a rather obvious obstruction.

You hail from where?

Are You a Yankee or a Rebel? – alphaDictionary * Southern Accent Test

Here’s a fun test you can take to see where you get some of your (American English) vocabulary and pronunciation. The test is billed as measuring your Southernness, but it’s more of an interactive compendium of selected U.S. regionalisms. Each question tells you where a particular usage or pronunciation comes from (so trying the different possible answers gives you info about the ones you don’t use). I get some of my vocabulary from growing up in Western Pennsylvania, some from my West Virginia family background (and hence a linguistic combination of Southern and Appalachian). While I picked up “y’all” when I moved to Texas, for the sake of the quiz I chose the 2nd person plural I grew up with, “you’uns” from the heart of Western Pennsylvania.

 

Eggcorns and other nutty expressions

The Eggcorn Database

Eggcorn: words and phrases used wrong, but in a way that kind of makes sense.

• All tolled
• Slack your thirst
• jar-dropping

A great one from my past was an old boss who more than once said, “Oh, that’s six to one, half a dozen of the other.”  Probably not technically eggcorn, because try as I might, I couldn’t wring any logic out of it.

History of eggcorns? Here’s a little edited quote from the website:

In September 2003, Mark Liberman reported an incorrect yet particularly suggestive creation: someone had written “egg corn” instead of “acorn”. It turned out that there was no established label for this type of non-standard reshaping. Erroneous as it may be, the substitution involved more than just ignorance: an acorn is more or less shaped like an egg; and it is a seed, just like grains of corn. So if you don’t know how acorn is spelled, egg corn actually makes sense.

The criteria of how to identify eggcorns have also been clarified. Not every homophone substitution is an eggcorn. The crucial element is that the new form makes sense: … more sense than the original form in many cases…. Thus, thumbs down for definately and they’re / there house … but thumbs up for for all intensive purposes.

Negotiations are not fun

I just learned that by definition, you cannot negotiate in your spare time. Negotiate comes from Latin negotiari “to transact business” which can be further broken down as neg- “not” + otium “leisure.” This “otium” finds its way into Spanish as ocio, which is their word for leisure time. Years ago I was in some Spanish-speaking city (probably Buenos Aires) where the alternative weekly publication for the arts and entertainment was called “Ocio,” which sent me to the dictionary to learn the word.

What other English words have this “otium” in them? I can’t think of any. Leave your comments!

Today’s entry is inspired by and partially quoted from today’s “What’s the Good Word?” daily word email from alphadictionary.com, which I’m enjoying most every day.

Often confused words

Often Confused Words in English

From alphadictionary.com, this link goes well with the 100 most mispronounced words entry a while back: a great list of words that sound enough alike to be confused frequently.  The page opens onto the E’s list, with e.g. vs. i.e. as the first entry.  A good place to start.

Covered in Bees

Beekeeping Words – my recent experience with a Swarm of Bees caused me to remember one word about bees, hear another, and look up some others.

Hive    	Colmena	

Worker		Obrera (ends with -a because all are female)

Drone		Zángano 

Royal Jelly	Jalea Real

Swarm		Enjambre

Honeycomb	Panal 

Mispronouncing Words

100 most commonly mispronounced words in English

This great link from dictionary.com has funny and frustrating mispronunciations that you hear all the time, like “Askteriks.”

I just ran across this mispronounced words link last night using a great Firefox plugin called Stumble or StumbleUpon. You tell it the kinds of things you are interested in and then click the toolbar button. It takes you to a site it thinks you will like! Very addictive already.

In South American Spanish, the mispronunciations I notice fall into two categories (though there are probably more). The first are like pronunciation vs. pronounciation: the former is correct, but doesn’t the latter make more sense? The primary example of this is that rain is lluvia, but raining is lloviendo rather than the sensible lluviendo. You hear people getting it wrong.

The second category has to do with consonant combinations involving the S sound. Pizza is commonly pronounced PEEK-sa, and Pepsi-Cola is PEK-si.

I don’t have a lot of room to talk: I can barely pronounce Accelerator in Spanish (accelerador), and for years when I was younger I pronounced foliage “foilage” and dexterous “dexterious.”  Then there was my brother’s family-famous pronouncement, “I won’t let that DEE-ter me.”  Live and learn.

Mascots y Mascotas et al.

Pets vs. Mascots. Got into this one working on the Dog Rally post. I’ve always thought it’s fascinating that pets are called mascotas in Spanish, and my curiosity about this led me to discover tonight that both words come from French and ultimately mean “good-luck charm.” Kind of pulls it together for me, how a dude in an alligator suit cavorting on the sidelines and a little terrier aren’t that different after all.

Enthusiasm. A wonderful word, as is its underused cousin, “enthused.” Turns out it comes straight from en+theos, “possessed by a god,” which I understand is a helluva way to get excited about stuff.

Scrutinize. This is my favorite word-origin “a-ha” of the last 2 years or so. Scruta is Latin for trash. So it is “to examine, search (as through trash)” (online etymological dictionary). So when you use this word or hear it used, picture searching for something so carefully, so thoroughly, that you are willing to sift through the trash.

Introducing The Word Page blog

I need a place to talk about words. English words, Spanish words, the fascinating interplay of the two, and perhaps most of all the origins of words. First, my two favorite word websites are:

WordReference.com which allows you to look up English definitions (with links to Dictionary.com and Merriam Webster online) as well as all of the following:

• English to Spanish
• Spanish to English
• Spanish monolingual
• Spanish synonyms
• And many more.

Dictionary.com is English only, but draws from multiple dictionaries including an etymological dictionary, American heritage dictionary which often discusses word origins in a chattier way than just the hyperconcentrated parenthetical etymologies of normal dictionaries.