Category: Words and phrases

Hmyz and Hums

By Simon

Hymz

I came across an interesting Czech word today – hmyz, which means “insect, ant, bug, creepy-crawly”.

It appears in my Czech phrasebook in the sentence, “V našem pokoji je hmyz” (There are insects in our room).

It sounds like the sounds insects make, but there are other words for hum in Czech – bzučet, vrčet, hučet (verbs); bzukot, šum, hukot (nouns).

Related words include:

– hmyzožravec = insectivore
– hmyzožravý = insectivorous
– repelent proti hmyzu = insect repellent

Sources: Wordbook.cz, Slovnik.cz, Slovniky.lingea.cz

Fosses and Sextons

By Simon

At the French Conversation Group last night one of the people had an old French language textbook from the 1950s which contains lots of stories in French. One of them contains the word “Le Fossoyeur” in the title, which is translated as “The Sexton”. As this wasn’t a word I’d come across before, I thought I’d find out more about it.

According to the Oxford Dictionaries, a sexton is:

A person who looks after a church and churchyard, typically acting as bell-ringer and gravedigger.

Sexton is a Middle English word that comes from the Anglo-Norman French segrestein, from medieval Latin sacristānus (sacristan), which comes from the Latin sacer/sacr- (sacred).

A sacristan is person in charge of a sacristy and its contents, and a sacristy is a “room in a church where a priest prepares for a service, and where vestments and articles of worship are kept.”

The French word fossoyeur can also mean “personne ou chose qui ruine, détruit” (sb or sth that ruins or destroys) [source], and comes from the word fosse (pit, grave), from the Latin fossa (ditch, trench), from fodiō (dig out, excavate) from the Proto-Indo-European Proto-Indo-European *bʰedʰ- (to pierce, dig) [source].

The word fosse / foss also exists in English and means a ditch or moat, but is rarely used, except by archaeologist, for whom it means “a long, narrow trench or excavation, especially in a fortification.” [source]. Fosse also appears in the name of the old Roman road from Lincoln to Exeter – the Fosse Way.

How to you?

By Simon

An interesting structure that came up in the Russian lesson I worked on today is Как тебе …? (Kak tebe …) or literally “How to you …”), which means “What do you think of …?”. The example in the lesson is Ну, как тебе пельмени? (Nu, kak tebe pel’meni?), which means “So, what do you think of pelmeni*?”. The reply is Очень вкусно! (Ochen’ vkusno!) = “Very tasty!”.

This illustrates the fact that you often use fewer words in Russian sentences than in other languages like English. In some ways this makes Russian easier as there are fewer words to worry about in sentences like this. Although if you’re trying to translate from English to Russian you have to remember to leave half the words out.

Do any other languages use a similar structure?

*Pelmeni are a kind of dumpling, usually filled with meat, or sometimes with vegetables or fish.

Suo Gân

By Simon

We are learning the traditional Welsh lullaby Suo Gân [sɨɔ ɡɑːn] in one of the choirs I sing in at the moment. It’s a lovely song that was first written down in 1800, but was probably composed around before then.

When I first saw the words Suo Gân I thought they might be Mandarin Chinese – I knew that gân is mutated version of the Welsh word for song, cân, but suo doesn’t look like Welsh. In fact suo is a variant spelling of sïo, which means “to hum, whizz or murmur”, so suo gân could be translated as “humming / murmured song”.

Here’s a recording of Bryn Terfel singing this song:

The words suo [suɔ] and gan [kan] have many meanings in Chinese, but there are only a couple of expressions I can find that combine both of them:

– 锁杆 [鎖桿] (suǒgǎn) = locking bar
– 所感 (suǒgǎn) = one’s impression of something

In the cold light of day

By Simon

An interesting expression I noticed recently is in the cold light of day. It is used to indicate that you are thinking about something calmly and clearly, and you might feel foolish, sorry or ashamed for thinking or doing that something. For example “The next morning, in the cold light of day, Sam realized that his ideas, which seemed so brilliant the night before, were complete nonsense.”

I hadn’t thought about it much before, but when I came across it today it struck me as slightly odd – can light be cold?

According to Dictionary.com, “This expression transfers the illumination of daylight to rational understanding and uses cold to emphasize the lack of passion.”

On AnswerBag it’s suggested that this phrase originates in Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy, published in 1894-5. A similar phrase certainly does appear in that book in the following extract, from the beginning of chapter 5:

“Oh, I don’t want any! I fear I ought not to have run away from that school! Things seem so different in the cold light of morning, don’t they? What Mr. Phillotson will say I don’t know! It was quite by his wish that I went there. He is the only man in the world for whom I have any respect or fear. I hope he’ll forgive me; but he’ll scold me dreadfully, I expect!”

Do you know of any earlier uses of this phrase?

Are there equivalents of this phrase in other languages?

Dobbing in

By Simon

If you heard or read that someone had been dobbed in, would you know what that meant?

It’s an expression used mainly in the UK, Australian and New Zealand that means to inform on someone to the authorities – i.e. the police, parents, teachers, etc. For example, if a member of a criminal gang told the police about the illegal activities of the gang, perhaps in the hope of a reduced sentence, or of escaping prosecution altogether, he or she could be said to be dobbing in the other members of the gang.

Other expressions with similar meanings are to grass someone up, and to grass on someone, both of which mean to inform on someone. You could also tell on someone, turn someone in, or report someone. Are there other ways to say the same thing?

According to the Oxford Dictionaries, you can also dob something in, that is “to contribute money to a common cause” (everyone dobbed in a few dollars), and to dob someone in can mean “to impose on someone to do something” (I dobbed him in to do the cleaning). I haven’t heard either of these uses before, have you? Wiktionary states that they are mainly used in Australia, and that to dob someone in can also mean “To nominate a person, often in their absence, for an unpleasant task.” Moreover, a dobber is someone who dobs people in.

The word dob is apparently a dialect word meaning “to put down abruptly” or “to throw something at a target”. The Phrase Finder says that dob might come from the dialects of Kent and/or Nottinghamshire in England, and first appeared in writing in the 1950s. There are also examples of dob in the dialects of Cornwall, Northamptonshire and Cheshire.

A Dictionary of the Kentish Dialect and Provincialisms (1888), defines dob as “to put down [something]”.

As pretty as a truck

By Simon

Un beau camion

An interesting French expression I learnt last week is beau comme un camion, which literally means “pretty as a truck/lorry”, and actually means pretty, cute or beautiful.

Apparently this idiom appeared around the middle of the 20th century and was at first ironic, as few people find trucks pretty. However it came to mean graceful and beautiful, and the use of the word camion (truck/lorry) emphasizes the importance of the word beau (pretty, beautiful) [source].

Here are some equivalents of this phrase in other languages:

English
– pretty as a picture
– easy on the eye(s)
– cute as a button

Spanish
– estar como un tren = to be like a train

Flemish
– een lust voor het oog = a pleasure for the eye

Dutch
– een ‘stoot’ zijn = a punch in the gob
– zo mooi als een madonna / plaatje = pretty like a madona/picture
– als een vlag op een modderschuit = like a flag on a barge filled with mud
– beeldschoon = pretty as a picture
– een plaatje = a photo

Romanian
– a fi rupt din soare = to be detached from the sun

Serbian
– lep k’o slika = pretty as a picture

Swedish
– vacker som en dag = pretty as a day

From: http://www.expressio.fr/expressions/beau-comme-un-camion.php

What about in your language(s)?

Take the frog and run!

By Simon

Tirelire grenouille

Yesterday I came across the interesting French word grenouiller, which literally means “to frog” and actually means “to indulge in shady dealings”, and seems to refer specifically to political intrigues, according to Le Dictionnaire.

A related expression is manger / bouffer la grenouille (literally, “to eat the frog”) = to scoop the till; to clean out the till; to take the money and run

According to Expressio.fr until the 18th century French piggy banks (les cochon tirelires / les tirelires cochon) were usually in the shape of frogs (grenouilles), rather than pigs (cochons), and the word grenouille came to be associated with money that had been set aside by a group or association. So manager la grenouille came to mean taking that money.

An alternative explanation from the same source is that manger is a synonym for croquer, which means to crunch or munch, and also means to squander an inheritance or sum of money. The grenouille in this expression comes from the slang term grenouiller, which was used until the 19th century, meaning to carouse in taverns, and to spend ill-gotten gains.

Is grenouiller still used? If not, are there alternative expressions meaning the same thing?

Little donkey bridges

By Simon

Ezelsbruggetje

I learnt an interesting word in Dutch today – ezelsbruggetje (“little donkey bridge”), which means a mnemonic, which associates words and other things you want to remember with images.

A number of possible origins for this word are given on ezelsbrug.nl, my favourite of which is that when donkeys were commonly used in the countryside they would go across gaps and ditches on temporary plank bridges, as they fear water, but not heights, and would thus take a short cut to their destination. The meaning then came to apply to memory tricks that give you a short cut to memorising things.

Do mnemonics have interesting names in other languages? Can you remember?

Here’s a tune I wrote called The Dancing Donkeys / Asynnod sy’n Dawnsio:

Quatschen

By Simon

I came across an interesting German word today – quatschen – which means to gab; to piffle; to talk rubbish; to chew the fat; to shoot the breeze; to blab; to yak; to squelch; to squidge [source].

It appears in a blog post in the sentence:

Aber da fragt auf dem Gathering auch niemand mehr, ob Esperanto ok ist, da wird einfach losgequatscht.

This means something like “But at the Gathering nobody asks any more if Esperanto is OK, they simply start yakking in it.” The Gathering in question was the Polyglot Gathering in Berlin, which I went to last week, and the post is about the languages most commonly used there. It mentions that apart from English, many people there spoke German, French, Spanish, Italian and/or Portuguese, and Esperanto, and that we switched between them frequently. This was certainly my experience – those were the most commonly-spoken languages there. I also met quite a few speakers and learners of Welsh, Dutch and Mandarin.

The related word (der) Quatsch means nonsense or rubbish, and the LEO dictionary gives a long list of English synonyms for this word:

folderol/falderol/falderal; balderdash; blah; blatherskite; flubdub; jabberwocky; malarkey; nonsense; nuts; punk; rubbish; taradiddle/tarradiddle; tommyrot/tommy-rot; guff; hoke; poppycock

I’ve come across some of these before, but not blatherskite, hoke, taradiddle, tommyrot or flubdub, and I haven’t heard punk used in this sense. According to the Oxford Dictionaries, a blatherskite is “a person who talks at great length without making much sense.”, and is referred to as a Quatschkopf in German, and a taradiddle is a petty lie.

There are also some related quatschian expressions:

– Quatsch! = My chin! Balls! That’s all my eye and Betty Martin.
– So ein Quatsch! = My eye! My foot!
– Das ist Quatsch! = That’s hokey!
– Mach keinen Quatsch! = Don’t be silly!
– Red keinen Quatsch! = Don’t talk nonsense!
– So ‘n Quatsch! = My ass!