Wild Word Friday! Our word today is COMPANION. This past week, Linda, my Bible Study leader (who once lived in Italy), happened to mention that the word COMPANION (which we were discussing) was very similar to the Italian words “with bread.” I came home and looked up COMPANION in one of my resource books. Sure enough. …
Wild Word Friday! PUMPKIN! As in pie! This is a great little word – all right, middle sized word – that comes to us via the Latin word, pepo, and then through Middle French popon or pompon to English. It means “cooked by the sun”, which is appropriate since we don’t eat PUMPKINs during their…
Wild Word Friday! Hmmm. CURMUDGEON. This word is a mystery. I’m not referring to it’s meaning, which is, of course, someone who is totally disagreeable, grumpy and not at all fun to be with. The mystery lies with its historical roots. Where in the heck did this word come from? Some folks believe it is…
Wild Word Friday! Okay, I admit it. I have never used the word STENTORIAN in my life. Not verbally, not in my writing, except for this post, of course. But it is a great word and worthy of Wild Word Friday. This word came to us via a piece of literature. In Homer’s Iliad, when…
WILD WORD FRIDAYS! Today we’re going to venture from English into German (Deutsch) for our Wild Word, or in this case, our wild phrase, AUF WIEDERSEHEN, which means good-bye. When you bid farewell to your German, Swiss or Austrian friends by saying AUF WIEDERSEHEN (pronounced owf vee-derr-zay’n), you are actually telling them (in a direct translation to…
Wild Word Friday!! Okay we have a wonderful new-to-me word that comes from the Danish and Middle English. (Did you know that many of the conquering Vikings who came to England were from Denmark? Thus many of our words have Danish roots.) The word is KNAR. A KNAR is one of those bark covered bumps…
Happy Wild Word Friday! Our word today is LAP, the noun. LAP is a very ancient word that can be traced all the way back to the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language (think 5 thousand years ago), which is the ancient mother form of almost all modern European languages and many Eastern Languages. Today an estimated three billion people speak languages…
WILD WORD FRIDAY! Our word today is LIMELIGHT. LIMELIGHT (as a compound word) has its genesis in the world of science. Goldsworthy Gurney (1793-1875), a British surgeon and chemist, discovered the “LIMELIGHT effect,” which refers to the intense light that occurs when an oxyhydrogen flame intersects a cylinder of quicklime. In 1837, to highlight performances London’s Covent Garden Theatre began…
Wild Word Friday again! Today’s word is FOLLOW, well not really follow, but follee. That’s the way my 91-year-old father-in-law says follow. He also pronounces swallow as swallee and hollow as hollee. As in, “I tried to follee the rabbit into the hollee, but he was gone before you could swallee twice.” For years I assumed his…
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