Unutterably Silly Roomba Kitteh

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by RWood

Why such as fuss over a paper about a firetruck?

[Dylrob]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

Aah, there he is again!

[montsnmags]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

heh. i wonder that too. my cat hides under the bed if i just go *near* the vacuum.

Homer (our old cat) would just lay there while you vacuumed, until you had to actually nudge him with the nozzle to get him to move. Oscar (my dog) just lays there, and doesn't take a nudge as a hint (or "as good as a wink to a blind bat"). Sometimes I just vacuum around him, picturing an Airedale-shaped sand-silhouette on the floor later when he moves (it never works out that way though. My artistic vision stomped on once again by cruel reality. ).

Originally Posted by RickyMaveety

My understanding is that that type of sausage was called a "little dog" (dachshund) sausage or frankfurter by the Germans, because it resembled a dog of the dachshund breed.
...

Did you know that when John Wayne was a kid he was actually called "Little Duke", and it was because the real "Duke" - his big Airedale Terrier - went everywhere with him?

I think there's something in that for all of us.

Cheers,
Marc

[slayda]

Originally Posted by RickyMaveety

Hmm .... just thinking about that .... biblioteca is library, but libro is book in Spanish. And, in English the library comes from Latin, but the "Bible" comes from the Greek, and I think "book" comes from the German.

Let's face it .... language is pretty much all over the damn place ... and always has been. I wonder if the reason that the word for library in so many of the otherwise Latin based languages comes Greek is because the first true great library was the one at Alexandria, which while technically an Egyptian city was actually built while the Ptolomaic pharaohs were ruling. They would have used the Greek word for books in naming or describing the building ... which was very well known to the Romans.

Just a thought .....

And, taking a minute or two to look at the Wiki about it .... "The Greek term "biblioteke", used by many historians of the time, refers in fact to the [royal] "Collection of Books" rather than to the building itself ..."
So, I think my little theory holds water ... at least in the Wonderful World of Wiki. So, the Greek rulers of post Alexandrian Egypt built a building to house the royal collection of books, and people started associating that term with the building, including the Romans, who as we all know had a pretty close association with Egypt during that period (think Caesar and Cleopatra), and so they took the term, now associated with the building, rather than the contents, and started using it.

This stuff is so much fun!! I mean that honestly.

I agree completely.

[RickyMaveety]

Originally Posted by NatCh

That's actually a clue as to which class ate what. In English, if the upper classes ate an animal then the food has a different name than the animal it came from, but animals which the lower classes ate are called the same thing alive or cooked. The modern English food names are derived from the French terms for the things eaten by the francophone gentry.

ie:

• pig -- ham/pork
• cow -- beef
• deer -- venison
• sheep -- mutton

versus:

• chicken
• rabbit
• duck
• fish
• turkey

I've always found this sort of thing fascinating.

Yes, although my high school English teacher explained that to me in a different way. It wasn't so much that the Francophones had one word for the meat and another for the animal .... it was that they never really dealt with the animals they ate in the field. That was the job of their Germanic underlings.

Thus, we tend to refer to the animals in the field by their Germanic names, and if the Norman French ate them in their homes, then we refer to the meat on the plate by the French based name.

But, you are right, it does sort of paint a picture of who ate what .....

[RickyMaveety]

Originally Posted by montsnmags

Homer (our old cat) would just lay there while you vacuumed, until you had to actually nudge him with the nozzle to get him to move. Oscar (my dog) just lays there, and doesn't take a nudge as a hint (or "as good as a wink to a blind bat"). Sometimes I just vacuum around him, picturing an Airedale-shaped sand-silhouette on the floor later when he moves (it never works out that way though. My artistic vision stomped on once again by cruel reality. ).



Did you know that when John Wayne was a kid he was actually called "Little Duke", and it was because the real "Duke" - his big Airedale Terrier - went everywhere with him?

I think there's something in that for all of us.

Cheers,
Marc

My old cat, Nugget, never moved for the vacuum either.

Love the story about Little Duke. As I recall, wasn't the real "Indiana" Jones also the boy's dog??

[montsnmags]

Originally Posted by RickyMaveety

...
Love the story about Little Duke. As I recall, wasn't the real "Indiana" Jones also the boy's dog??

Hah! Yes, that's right, I remember that now. I wonder if the writers were intentionally making the allusion?

Cheers,
Marc

[Patricia]

It is the same with linen.

The plant is flax (Anglo-Saxon).

But all the derivatives are French: linen, lint, lingerie (underlinen) and linseed oil.

[zelda_pinwheel]

huh. i never thought about "linge" and "lingerie" coming from "lin" (flax). it seems so obvious, now. of course none of my modern-day linge is actually made from linen, so it's not an immediate association.

[RickyMaveety]

Yeah ... sometimes it a matter of degrees .... like the one I mentioned about a regular house coming from haus, but a ginormous house being a mansion from maison. Because of course, when the Norman gentlemen pointed to his "house" it was a larger house than that of his Germanic neighbor.

Also .... while we get boat and ship from the German, we get navy from the French. Most of the time, if having a lot of something made you powerful, then you would use the French based word for the thing.

The history of English is really a history of the merging of two very different cultures. Yet another thing I enjoy about the language.

[slayda]

Originally Posted by RickyMaveety

Yeah ... sometimes it a matter of degrees .... like the one I mentioned about a regular house coming from haus, but a ginormous house being a mansion from maison. Because of course, when the Norman gentlemen pointed to his "house" it was a larger house than that of his Germanic neighbor.

Also .... while we get boat and ship from the German, we get navy from the French. Most of the time, if having a lot of something made you powerful, then you would use the French based word for the thing.

The history of English is really a history of the merging of two very different cultures. Yet another thing I enjoy about the language.

What? Only two different cultures?

[RickyMaveety]

Originally Posted by slayda

What? Only two different cultures?

Linguistically ... two cultures made up the biggest part of the language, but then, if you start considering that French was Latin based, and that some portions of "Norman French" are actually Danish based ... then throw in the Celtic and Gaelic input to the language .... and POOF .... English. Oh, and before I forget ... there's the Greeks to consider as well.

[RWood]

My teachers never seemed to like the use of certain Anglo-Saxon words like (as Lenny Bruce would say in his coy moments), "the short word for loving."

There was a constant effort in English classes when I went to school (at least in the schools I attended) to stress the elimination of short Anglo-Saxon words when there was another (longer) French derived word. In addition to awkward speech and writing patterns it also produced a gulf between writing for English classes and writing for Physics or History classes. I later adopted the AP Style Guide and the Chicago Manual of Style and have purged most of the high school English class material.

[RickyMaveety]

Originally Posted by RWood

My teachers never seemed to like the use of certain Anglo-Saxon words like (as Lenny Bruce would say in his coy moments), "the short word for loving."

There was a constant effort in English classes when I went to school (at least in the schools I attended) to stress the elimination of short Anglo-Saxon words when there was another (longer) French derived word. In addition to awkward speech and writing patterns it also produced a gulf between writing for English classes and writing for Physics or History classes. I later adopted the AP Style Guide and the Chicago Manual of Style and have purged most of the high school English class material.

Well, sure, because using the short Anglo-Saxon word would mean that you were less educated and lower class. Using the French-based word would mean that you were well educated and higher class.

And .... my reply to that is they can kiss my ass (from the Anglo Saxon "ars" meaning buttocks).

[wayrad]

I think Sir Walter Scott may have been the first one to point out the different English terms for animals and their meat. From Ivanhoe, 1819:

"Why, how call you those grunting brutes running about on their four
legs?" demanded Wamba.

"Swine, fool, swine," said the herd, "every fool knows that."

"And swine is good Saxon," said the Jester; "but how call you the sow
when she is flayed, and drawn, and quartered, and hung up by the heels,
like a traitor?"

"Pork," answered the swine-herd.

"I am very glad every fool knows that too," said Wamba, "and pork, I
think, is good Norman-French; and so when the brute lives, and is in
the charge of a Saxon slave, she goes by her Saxon name; but becomes a
Norman, and is called pork, when she is carried to the Castle-hall to
feast among the nobles; what dost thou think of this, friend Gurth, ha?"