casual water – “a temporary accumulation of water on the golf course”. Technically the accumulation of water has to be above ground and visible, and this does not include lakes; wet, spongy, mushy or muddy ground; dew or frost, or snow or ice [source].
So in other words casual water is another way of describing a puddle, a diminutive of the Old English word pudd (ditch) which originally referred to pools and ponds as well [source].
I came across today’s word, spurtle, in a book I’m reading at the moment. It’s described as “a wooden utensil for stirring porridge” in the book, while according to Wikipedia it is:
a Scots kitchen tool, dating from at least the fifteenth century. It was originally a flat, wooden, spatula-like utensil, used for flipping oatcakes on a hot griddle. This terminology is now confined to Angus and Perthshire.
Over time, the original implement changed shape and began being used specifically for stirring oatmeal and soups. The rod-like shape is designed for constant stirring which prevents the porridge from congealing and so becoming lumpy and unappetising. It looks like a fat wooden dowel, often with a contoured end to give the user a better grip.
A Golden Spurtle is the first prize at the World Porridge Making Championships, which take place in Carrbridge in Scotland.
The Spurtle is also the name of a Scottish Country dance.
The etymology of spurtle is uncertain, however while searching for it, I found a possibly related word in A etymological dictionary of the Scottish language:
SPURKLE, A sort of spattle. “Scutching spurkle, a stick to beat flax.” “Thacking spurkle, a broad-mouth’d stick for thatching with”. […] perhaps Spurkle is merely a variety of Spurtle.
Petrichor, noun, /ˈpɛtrɨkər/ – the scent of rain on dry earth.
It comes from the Greek πέτρος (petros – stone) and ἰχώρ (ichor – the fluid that flows in the veins of the Greek gods), and was coined in 1964 by two Australian researchers, I.J. Bear and R.G. Thomas. The smell isn’t of the rain itself but comes from the oils released by vegetation when rain falls [source].
I found this word while searching for dripple, which I hear on the radio last night and which was described as being a type of light rain that isn’t quite drizzle. The only references to dripple I could find gave it’s meaning as “weak or rare” and there was no mention of rain.
I also found the Beaufort Rain Scale, a spoof version of the Beaufort Scale which ranges from:
Force 0: Complete Dryness.
Absence of rain from the air. The gap between two periods of wet.
Associated Phrase: “it looks like it might rain.”
through
Force 4: Visible Light Shower.
Hair starts to congeal around ears. First rainwear appears. People start to remember washing left out. Ignored by all sportsmen except Wimbledon players, who dash for cover. A newspaper being read outside starts to tear slightly.
Associated Phrases: “it’s starting to come down now,” “it won’t last,” and “it’s settled in for the day now.”
to
Force 10: Hurricane.
Not defined inland – the symptoms are too violent and extreme (cars floating, newspaper readers lost at sea, people drowned by inhaling rain, etc.). So, if hurricane conditions do appear to pertain, look for some other explanation.
Associated Phrases: “oh my god, the water tank has burst – it’s coming through the kitchen ceiling,” and “i think the man upstairs has fallen asleep in his bath.”
This morning I heard an interesting Welsh word on Radio Cymru that I hadn’t come across before – dadsothachu [dadsɔ’θaxɨ̬]. It means “to declutter” and combines a verbed form of the word sothach (bilge, garbage, junk, trash, trumpery) with the prefix dad-, which is the equivalent of the English prefixes de- and un-, and also serves as an intensifier. Another word they used for the same action was dadclytero (I think that’s how to spell it). Neither of these words appear in dictionaries I’ve checked.
I’ve been trying to declutter since I moved, and indeed before that. So far I’ve taken quite a lot books to local charity shops, but there’s plenty more filling my bookcases. At the same time I’ve acquired quite a lot more stuff. I also have more space in my new house, so the temptation is to fill it with even more stuff.
Last night I discovered that the French word for haddock is églefin or aiglefin, but when smoked it’s called haddock, which is also spelled hadock and hadot. Other French names for the unsmoked fish include aigrefin, Âne, Ânon, Bourricot and Saint-Pierre.
The French églefin/aiglefin comes from the Latin aeglefinus, which in made up of aegle from the Greek αἴγλη (light, radiance, glory), and finus.
Haddock (Melanogrammus aeglefinus), is apparently also known as offshore hake in English, and the word haddock is thought to come from the Middle English haddok, the Anglio-Norman hadoc and the Old French hadot, the origins of which are uncertain.
Another word I learnt last night was houblon [‘ublɔ̃], which is French for hops (humulus lupulus), and I just like the sound of it.
Today’s word, snicket [‘snɪkɪt], is a narrow passage between buildings, walls or fences in some parts of northern England. It’s origins are shrouded in mystery.
There are quite a few other words for such passages, including: gennel/ginnel/jennel [‘dʒɛnəl, ‘dʒɪnəl, ‘gɪnəl], vennel, bunnyrun, close, wynd, jitty, alley, alleyway, passage, passageway, entry, lane, laneway, twitten and twitchel.
Do you have any others?
Source: languagehat
I’m listening to Fry’s English Delight while writing this and just discovered that traffic lights are called robot in South Africa.
The word snig came up in conversation with a friend who came to fix some of my doors last week. They weren’t closing properly and he sawed and planed bits of them. We found that the catch doesn’t work in one of them, but the lock, a small metal slidding one, does. My friend told me that such locks are called snigs, a word I hadn’t heard before and which I can’t find in any of the dictionaries I’ve checked. Maybe it’s a dialect word.
A similar word that is perhaps related is sneg, which is what the window fitters called the metal protrusions that slide out to lock the windows in place.
Have any of you heard of either of these words?
Do you have other words for these kinds of locks?
Yesterday I learnt how to say thank you in Latvian – paldies /pal’dies/ – from the Latvian lads who delivered and installed my new garden shed. Although they didn’t speak much English, we managed to communicate. When I asked where they were from, they didn’t understand the question, then one of them said, “oh, what country?” and they told me Latvia.
In situations like this when I find myself speaking to people whose language I don’t know and who don’t speak much English, I tend to feel frustrated. Not by their limited English, but by the fact that I don’t know any of their language. It also helps to try saying things in various ways until you find one they understand, as the “Where are you from?” example demonstrates.
Looking at the Latvian phrases on Omniglot, it strikes me that hardly any words look familiar, apart from the lab part of labdien (good afternoon) and labvakar (good evening), which resembles the Lithuanian word labas, which is used for hello, and in such phrases as Laba diena (good afternoon) and labas vakaras (good evening), both of which are similar to the Latvian versions. The words dien (day) and vakar (evening) also resemble their equivalents in Slavic languages such as Czech – den and večer,and Russian – день (den’) and вечер (večer).
Are any of you learning Latvian or planning to learn it?
Last week I looked at quite a few paint colours, trying to decide which ones to use in my house, and found the names given to the different colours interesting.
As there are so many different colours, paint manufacturers use various whys to describe them.
Whites, for example, come in many shades, including:
Some paints have more imaginative names, such as:
What I’ve found is that the same name might be used from different colours. For example, straw is a creamy colour from one paint company, and an orangey-brown colour from another.
I’ve chosen a colour called warm blue for my bedroom, water, a lighter blue, for my music room (the spare bedroom), and buttermilk, a lightish yellow, for my bathroom. The rest of the house is painted magnolia, a kind of creamy-white colour.
Do paint colours have interesting names in other languages?
I moved into my new house yesterday and am currently having new carpets fitted, which got me wondering about the origins of the word carpet.
Carpet has been traced back to the Proto-Indo-European root *kerp- (to pluck, gather, harvest) via the Old French carpite (heavy decorated cloth), the Middle Latin carpita (thick woolen cloth) the past participle of the Latin carpere (to card, pluck).
*kerp- is also the root of the English word harvest, the Greek καρπός (karpos – fruit, grain, produce, harvest, children, poetry [fruit of the mind], profit); and the Irish ciorraigh (to cut, hack, maim).
Sources: Online Etymology Dictionary and Wiktionary.