Things I did not know: apparently, there are alcohol suppositories. Supposedly popular among youths, partially because that delivery method bypasses the stomach, so you don't vomit.

I knew that alcohol could be absorbed by mucous membranes (from a medicine you were supposed to leave in your mouth for a bit for part of it to be absorbed there), but ( Read more... )

So apparently, “demonstrative” (as in “demonstrative pronoun”) is stressed on the second syllable: deMONstrative.

I have pretty much been stressing it on the first, like with “demonstrate”; hence, DEMonstrative.

That’s fairly far back, but not unheard-of for English (compare, for example, “investigator”, which also has main stress on the fourth ( Read more... )

While I was reading through a paper on developing orthographies for previously unwritten languages (from the 2011 LSA Symposium on Developing Orthographies for Unwritten Languages), I came across the word obesity, presented as an exception to the English process known as Trisyllabic Laxing (TSL): instead of the expected short vowel in the second ( Read more... )

According to Wikipedia, the first component of the German word Bargeld “cash” comes from the Greek βαρύς “heavy”, since originally money was in the form of (heavy, metallic) coins.

Edit: neither my Duden nor my dtv Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Deutschen support that claim; they both relate it to “bar” meaning “nackt; frei von; sofort verfügbar” ( ( Read more... )

So apparently palette (the thing an artist keeps their paint on) is pronounced /ˈpælɪt/ (rhymes with mallet or, for that matter, pallet, as in the thing that you stack goods and and carry with a forklift).

I had always assumed it was a /pəˈlɛt/ (puh-LET), à la française.

Whodathunkit.

Apparently, ounce and inch both go back to Latin uncia “one-twelfth part” (of a pound, foot, etc.).

ounce was borrowed via French while inch came directly from Latin into Old English, which accounts for the different sound changes each word went through.

So those words are doublets just like skirt/shirt, fragile/frail, and so on.

Fun stuff!

I would have thought that choose and choice would be related, but they’re only related distantly: choose is Germanic (related to German kiesen/auserkoren; Kür, etc.) while choice is Romance (though ultimately from Germanic as well).

I knew Ajungilak as a brand of sleeping bags from my scouting days.

Today, while reading a phrasebook of Greenlandic, I read that ajunngilaq means “it is good” (aju·nngila·q be.bad-OPPOSITE-3sg).

I presume that’s not a coincidence.

OK, so I knew that cherries are related to plums, since they’re both in genus Prunus. What I didn’t know is that almonds are, too-and that they’re even more closely related to peaches, both being in the subgenus amygdalus!

Almonds, peaches-what is difference?

Huh. Whodathunkit.

A utensil that’s apparently ubiquitous in the Netherlands yet unknown outside the country: the bottle scraper (flessenschraper/flessenlikker).

Useful for extracting the last bits of vla (which is more viscous than milk) from the bottles it was traditionally sold in; modern versions of the scraper apparently have not only a rounded edge useful for ( Read more... )