tittle, noun = a small mark in printing or writing, especially a diacritic

Origin: from Latin titulus – label

I came across this word while researching the origin of the dot on the letters i and j, which is known as a tittle. This diacritic was apparently first used to distinguish the letter i from other letters in Latin manuscripts during the 11th century. Originally the tittle was bigger, but was reduced in size gradually until it reached its current dimensions.

Source: Wikipedia

Saying “white rabbits” on the first day of each month apparently brings you luck, at least that’s what I was told as a child. I have no idea why – it’s just a superstition. Any suggestions why white rabbits might be lucky? Do you do or say any other things on the first of each month to bring to luck?

Today is May Day and a bank holiday in the UK. Traditional activities on this day include Morris dancing, a form of folk dancing that dates back to at least 1448 and that is praticed mainly in England. It involves a bunch of blokes in unusual costumes dancing around, waving handkerchiefs and attacking each other with sticks. This is often perpetrated in the vicinity of a pub so that the participants can refresh themselves after their exertions.

dialect, noun = a form of a language which is peculiar to a specific region or social group (from: Compact Oxford English Dictionary). Another definition, from Wikipedia, is “a complete system of verbal communication (oral or signed but not necessarily written) with its own vocabulary and/or grammar.”

Origin: from the Greek διάλεκτος (dialektos) – discourse, way of speaking.

Deciding whether a particular form of speech is a language or a dialect is a task fraught with difficulties. As well as linguistic criteria, there are also political, geographic and cultural issues to be considered. For example, closely related languages spoken in different countries, such as Norwegian, Swedish and Danish, might be considered dialects of one language if they were all spoken in a single country. There is considerable mutual intelligibility between these languages, but each of them has its own written standard, or two written standards in the case of Norwegian, which seems to be a good criterion for distinguishing languages. Perhaps you could define a language as a dialect with a standardised written form.

In the case of Arabic, there is one standard written form: Modern Standard Arabic, and many colloquial spoken forms, all of which are considered dialects of Arabic and are rarely used in writing. Though there is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between neighbouring colloquial forms of Arabic, for example, Jordanian and Syrian Arabic, speakers of these dialects have difficultly understanding the Arabic spoken by Moroccans and Algerians. This is an example of a dialect continuum.

Where do dialects come from?
When groups of people are isolated from others, the way they speak tends to drift away from mainstream forms of their language. Changes in the mainstream forms may not occur in the isolated form, and vice versa. Over time, the isolated form develops into a distinctive dialect, and if the isolation continues for long enough, that dialect may eventually become a language with it’s own written standard.

Another source of the differences between dialects comes from the languages once spoken in the regions where the dialects are now spoken. When people shift from one language to another, they usually carry over some features of their original language, including pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. The dialects of English spoken in Ireland, for example, retain quite a few features of Irish. Similarly, substrates of the languages once spoken in the different regions of England can be found in some of today’s regional dialects. Moreover, the modern Celtic languages may contain substrates of the languages they replaced, whatever they were.

octothorpe, noun = # The literal meaning of this word is “eight fields”: thorpe comes from the Old Norse for village, farm or hamlet, and octo means eight. In cartography it’s used as a symbol for villages: eight fields around a central square. Other names for this symbol include hash, numeral sign, number sign, pound sign and crosshatch.

There’s more information and the names of this symbol in various other languages on Wikipedia

interrobang, noun = ‽ – a little-used symbol that combines the question mark and exclamation mark.

These words came up yesterday on Word of Mouth, BBC Radio 4’s programme about words and language, when they discussed some of the unusual names for symbols like #, @, & and !. Other names they mentioned included screamer or bang for the exclamation mark (!), monkey’s tail, snail or elephant (in languages other than English) for the @ sign, bithorpe for the hyphen (-) and quadrothorpe for the equals sign (=).

You can listen to Word of Mouth on the BBC website

Do you have any interesting/poetic names for these or other symbols?

brachiate, adjective = having widely divergent paired branches; verb = to swing by the arms from one hold to the next

Origin: from Latin bracchiātus – with armlike branches.

Here’s another interesting word from Richard Dawkins’ “The Ancestor’s Tale” – he mentions it while discussion the astounding acrobatic abilities of gibbons, and speculating whether our evolutionary ancestors were brachiators.

Related words
brachium, noun = arm or wing. From Latin bracchium – arm, from Greek βραχίον (brakhiōn) – arm
brachial, adjective = of or relating to the arm or am armlike structure
brace, noun = something that steadies, binds, or holds up something else
braces (UK) = suspenders (US)
bracelet
bracer, noun = a leather guard worn to protect the arm in archery and fencing

It’s also interesting to see how the Latin word bracchium has changed in Latin’s daughter languages:

Italian – braccio
Spanish – brazo
Portuguese – braço
Catalan – braç
French – bras
Romanian – braţ
Rumantsch – bratsch

The Welsh word for arm, braich, also appears to come from the same root.

The English word arm comes from Old English, and is related to the German Arm, Old Norse armr (arm), Latin armus (shoulder) and Greek harmos (joint).

proboscitude, adjective = the condition of having a long flexible prehensile trunk.

From proboscis, noun = a long flexible prehensile trunk or snount, as of an elephant; the elongated mouthparts of cetain insects, adapted for piercing and sucking food

Origin: via Latin from Greek προβοσκις (proboskis) – trunk of an elephant, from βοσκειν (boskein) – to feed

I’ve just started reading “The Ancestor’s Tale – A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution” by Richard Dawkins. In the introduction he explains why he has chosen to tell the story of evolution starting with humans and working backwards: he says it’s natural for a human to do it this way. If an elephant was telling the tale, he or she would most likely start with elephants then look for their ancestors “on the main trunk road of evolution”. He goes on to speculate that:

“Elephant astronomers might wonder whether, on some other world, there exist alien life forms that have crossed the nasal rubicon and taken the final leap to full proboscitude.”

Proboscitude is such a wonderful word that I thought I’d share it with you.

Other English words for nose are also interesting, and include conk, hooter, schozzle and snout.

“To be nosey” or “to stick one’s nose where it doesn’t belong” are both used to describe unwelcome curiosity in the doings of others. Do the equivalent idioms in other languages involve noses? If not, are there any nose-related idioms that mean something else?