Egyptian Arabic idiom of the day: زِهِقْت zihíʾt "I'm sick of it, I'm fed up." It can take an indirect object with min, e.g. [zɪhɪʔtə mɪnə ʃːuɣl] "I'm sick of work."

Happy Monday

Is Congress about to shut up about the shutdown?

"quote" and "quoth" are not related. Quote is from Medieval Latin (via French) quotāre (“to distinguish by numbers, number chapters”), itself from Latin quotus (“which, what number"). Quoth is from ME quoth, quath, from OE cwæþ (first and third person past indicative of cweþan = to say).

OE "stede" /ˈste.de/ meaning a place or site survives in compounds such as homestead, set phrases such as in her stead, and the word instead. It's cognate with German Stadt (city) and Yiddish שטעטל (shtetl).

I just learned the word "vigesimal," meaning base-20, of a numeral system. French has pseudo-vigesimal numbers like quatre-vingt treize (4 • 20 + 13 = 93)

Wiktionary thinks that Biblical Hebrew אֵיד (distress, calamity) is a descendant of Latin idus (ides)!?

Done

"NaN: The Mystery of the Missing Data" is a book I'm guessing no one would read.

Note to self: Levenshtein Distance is a great song title for a song about being in love with someone named Levenshtein

The shutdown isn't on the floor

Happy Friday

Humanities people should do this kind of fun stuff on social media. Word Cup or Archival Document Cup. Overwrought Theoretical Intervention Cup. Do the kids still say intervention?

Today at work I was the only person sitting at a cluster of six desks. Beside me was an empty cluster of four desks. I was also told today that they're going to unassign my desk because I'm not coming into the office three days a week. I'm going to sit there anyway and see what anyone does about it

If I were a betting man I would have just lost a bunch of money. Which is why I don't gamble.

The i in "handiwork" is a remnant of the OE ġe- prefix, usually indicating completion: handġeweorc [ˈhɑnd.jeˌwe͜orˠk]. This prefix is of course cognate with the ge- used in regular German past participles.

I was aiming to send off fifty resumes a week but I think that may have been too ambitious. I think I've applied to the twelve jobs on LinkedIn I might be qualified for. Maybe I'll reduce it to twenty per week.

Live Laugh Love

Capybaras are guinea pig-adjacent

I can't think of a better place to enjoy a nice bowl of Life cereal than a bench at the Mile High RTD station.

The word "whit" is mostly preserved in the expression "to not care a whit." It is a descendant of OE wiht (/wixt/, [wiçt]), meaning a creature or thing. "Wight" is a descendant of the same word.

I lived on Charles Babbage Rd in Cambridge for a year and never knew a thing about him and just came across this quote. Anyway I'd like to be able to respond to a question as he does here someday.

Very interesting read on where "she" comes from. "Sche" is an East Midlands variant of the 3rd per. fem. sing. I like the idea that maybe OE hēo > scho in the north got its vowel under the influence of "he".

just drew the connection between gemination and gemini. brain expanded. perhaps even doubled

Apparently the etymology of "she" is not that clear. OE is hēo, and then, "with an irregular change in stress from hēo to heō /hjoː/, then a development from /hj-/ to /ç/ to /ʃ-/, similar to the derivation of Shetland from Old Norse Hjaltland" according to Wiktionary.

Happy Monday

Probably everyone I know has already heard this cover of Melancholy Hill in Middle Scots youtu.be/KXpa8gFJ2Eo?...

Here's an Old English riddle for you: A wonder happened on the wave: water turned to bone wundor wearð on weġe: wæter wearð to bane

Prairie dog. Or, as I like to call it, a prairie guinea pig.

"king" is a descendant of OE cyning [ˈky.niŋɡ], in turn derived from a compound of cynn (kin) and the -ing suffix. A semantic shift occurred from "someone of the family" > "someone that inherits (from their family)". cynn's IE root is the source of Ancient Greek γένος (génos) and Latin genus.

Gonna get in touch with my inner Éowyn

Some fleabanes are still alive

The word "lord" derives from Old English hlāford < hlāfweard, a compound of hlāf (“bread”) + weard (“guardian”). The descendants of hlāf and weard are loaf and ward. So "lord" means loaf-ward.

Anonymous 18th c guinea pig poem. It was included in several nursery rhyme collections in the 19th and early 20th c