GARAGE
Wild Word Friday!
I’m up to my eyeballs in getting everything ready for a GARAGE sale, so I decided to visit the ancient roots of the word GARAGE. I absolutely love to find that one of our wild words harkens back to Indo-European times, (That means about six thousand years ago!) and guess what? GARAGE does just that.
Do I mean that our ancient proto-European ancestors had GARAGEs? No, but they did cover things, and their word for to cover comes from the root wer. Move forward quite a few generations to the Proto-Germanic root word war, and then to the Frankish people, who said waron, which meant to guard. We wend our way through middle French to garer – to shelter or dock ships. In modern French garer becomes GARAGE, a place for storing something, and, for once, English uses the exact same word, just pronounced a bit differently.
And there you have it, the etymological reason why I’m holding a GARAGE sale! My husband and I have taken the whole GARAGE idea way too far and have sheltered way too many things. So this Saturday will be GARAGE sale day for us, with the hopes that we can downsize at least a little! Wish us luck!
Question for you: Are you a pack rat like me or do you manage to keep the “stuff” in your life at reasonable levels?
Blessings!
Sue
(Photo by Joe Mabel, GNU Free Documentation License.)
I don’t think I quite qualify as a pack rat, but I also don’t do away with household excesses very well. I just keep trying to organize them better by rearranging. LOL. Our son is another matter. He has two garages that are full of everything except cars… they stay outside.
Garage sales are good for getting items recycled, but they are also a lot of work. I hope yours is a huge success.
I love going to garage sales… I get alot of satisfaction getting stuff for a bargain . I collect stuff for myself, an to recycle them by painting an fixing them up an give them away as gifts or save to sell in a sale myself. Thats how i furnished my house by going to sales an thrift stores. I work with what little money i have. Wish I lived closer to you so i could go to your sale, so i wish you success in your sale. Just mention you are a famous author that should boost sales.
Thank you, Donna! The garage sale went really well.