{"id":13445,"date":"2017-01-27T12:43:27","date_gmt":"2017-01-27T11:43:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=13445"},"modified":"2017-01-27T12:43:27","modified_gmt":"2017-01-27T11:43:27","slug":"wheels-with-teeth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=13445","title":{"rendered":"Wheels with teeth"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"An<\/p>\n

I discovered last night that in French a cog is a une dent<\/em>, which also means a tooth, or une dent d’engrenage<\/em> (“tooth gear”), and a cog wheel is une roue dent\u00e9e<\/em> (a toothed wheel), which is kind of a cog looks like.<\/p>\n

The English word cog, meaning a tooth on a gear, or a gear or a cogwheel, comes from the Middle English cogge<\/em>, from the Old Norse kugg<\/em> (notch), from the Proto-Germanic *kugg\u014d<\/em> (cog, notch), from the Proto-Indo-European *gug\u0101<\/em> \u200e(hump, ball), from *g\u0113u-<\/em> \u200e(to bend, arch).<\/p>\n

A cog can also refer to an unimportant individual in a greater system, e.g. He’s just a cog in the machine, which in French would be Il n’est pas qu’un rouage de la machine<\/em> – rouage<\/em> is another word for cog or gearwheel, and also means part. Les rouages<\/em> means machinery, as in les rouages de l’\u00c9tat<\/em> (the machinery of state) or les rouages de l’administration<\/em> (the wheels of government).<\/p>\n

In German a cog is Zahn<\/em> (tooth) and a cogwheel is Zahnrad<\/em> (toothwheel). He is only a cog in a machine is Er ist nur ein R\u00e4dchen im Getriebe<\/em> (“He is only a little wheel in the works\/gears\/gearbox”), or Er ist nur eine Nummer unter vielen<\/em> (“He is only a number among many”).<\/p>\n

Are there similar expressions in other languages about being a cog in a machine?<\/p>\n

Sources: Reverso<\/a>, Wiktionary<\/a>, WordReference.com<\/a> and giantbomb.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I discovered last night that in French a cog is a une dent, which also means a tooth, or une dent d’engrenage (“tooth gear”), and a cog wheel is une roue dent\u00e9e (a toothed wheel), which is kind of a cog looks like. The English word cog, meaning a tooth on a gear, or a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,107,111,116,10,36,45,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-etymology","category-french","category-german","category-language","category-old-norse","category-proto-indo-european","category-words-and-phrases"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13445"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13445\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}