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The more you study etymology, linguistics, and the development of language, the more you realize that language is always changing. It does have rules of a sort—literally all languages do—but those rules evolve, so I’ve found that being prescriptive about colloquialisms and emerging language patterns isn’t productive.The rules were meant to be broken.Wordplay is as old as language itself.

Meteor comes from the Greek metéoˉron, literally “a thing high up” in the air. In 15th-century English, meteor could refer to any atmospheric phenomenon visible from the ground.That’s why meteorology refers to the study of atmospheric conditions, rather than just shooting stars.

The word “avocado” journeyed into English from the Aztec language Nahuatl. In addition to being a word for the fruit, the original word ahuakatl/aˉhuacatl also meant “testicle,” because avocados were thought to look a lot like wrinkly dangly balls.

This one sounds far too fanciful to be true, but I assure you it is an eponym: Sideburns are named after the resplendent and voluminous whiskers of Union Civil War general Ambrose E. Burnside. Starting around the 1870s, they were called “burnsides,” but shortly thereafter, the words were transposed.

The word meme is modeled after the word “gene” because of the way memes spread and evolve. It was coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene.

…from the Arabic mata “he died,” which also appears in the phrase shah mat “the king died”—the source of the word “checkmate,” after some folk etymology adaptations to English spelling.

..River Avon”means“River River”because“Avon”comes from a Welsh word for river,&..Connecticut River is similarly pleonastic because “Connecticut”is from a Mohican word meaning“at the long tidal river.” ..the Sahara Desert(Sahara is a transliteration of the Arabic word for“desert”—thus,the “desert desert”)&the Faroe Islands(from the Faroese word Føroyar,which already means“sheep island”—thus,the“sheep island islands”)

A similar example of a geographical kadigan is “the boondocks” or, in short, “the boonies” as a word for a rural area. It’s from the Tagalog word bundok, meaning “mountain,” which American soldiers borrowed while stationed in the Philippines as a word meaning “a wild, remote place.”

In Middle English, island was spelled yland.The root of the first part of the word means “water,” so island literally means “water-land”..It does not share a root with the word isle, which is from Old French and ultimately from the Latin insula. But people assumed, based on pronunciation and the overlap in meaning, that yland and isle were related, and so they essentially became a portmanteau in the form of “island.”

…But feist as a word for a small dog is a shortened version of the Middle English phrase fysting curre—that is, feisting cur.A cur is a dog, and “fysting” meant “stinking” but literally “farting” or “breaking wind.”Thus, to be feisty is to be like a stinky, farty little mutt dog.

Women always persuade men that they are lions, with a will of iron, when they are making sheep of them.

His forehead, projecting like a satyr’s, a sign of obstinate tenacity in passion, was surmounted by a jet-black head of springing hair like a virgin forest, below which a pair of clear eyes glittered, so tawny and untamed as to make it seem credible that his mother when carrying him had been frightened by a jaguar.

Once again, as always, the angry, scared men of Juniper killed the Cole women rather than face themselves and their actions. And men like him would never pay.

Hulot, during this period, was one of those fine human ruins whose virility asserts itself in a kind of bushy growth of hair from ears and nose and fingers, like the moss springing up on the almost indestructible monuments of the Roman Empire.

Complicity in vice, remember this, is the real Holy Alliance in Paris. Men pursuing some financial interest in the end break away from one other; those with a vice have always a common interest.

But the sweetly prim respectability, the outer semblance of virtue, the hypocritical ways of a married woman who never spends anything, apparently, but the day-to-day housekeeping expenses, who demurs at any show of extravagance, lead men to unsignposted, unspectacular ruin, ruin all the stranger because the victim finds excuses, and cannot find a cause for his disaster.

The great men&women of the Empire,in their follies,rivalled the great aristocrats of the old régime.Under the Restoration the aristocracy has always remembered having been persecuted&robbed, &so,..become economical,careful,&provident: in fact bourgeois&inglorious.Now,1830 has completed the work of 1793. … from now on,there will be great names but no more great houses..Everything bears the stamp of personal interest.

The expectation that Palestinians must always be resilient is dehumanizing. Narratives of perpetual resilience can gloss over the brutality of colonial oppression and reduce the complexity of the violence that Palestinians endure.

Media blackout: International journalists and investigators are banned, making this genocide largely unseen by the world.

Aid restrictions: Gaza is blockaded by land, sea, and air. The very state responsible for the genocide controls humanitarian aid entry.

Targeting of aid workers: Rescue workers, healthcare providers, and journalists are being killed at unprecedented rates.

Gaza is different than other conflict areas I’ve worked in in several ways. Demographics: The violence indiscriminately targets civilians of all ages and genders.
Entrapment: Unlike in other war zones, Gazans cannot flee. There ’s no safe zone. So-called safe zones where civilians are forcibly transferred have repeatedly been targeted by the Israeli military.
…

A peasant girl from the Vosges, with everything that that implies: thin, dark, with glossy black hair, heavy eyebrows meeting across the nose in a tuft, long and powerful arms, and broad solid feet, with some warts on her long, simian face: there is a quick sketch of the spinster.

By the end of June 2024, approximately 83% of all plant life and 70% of farmland had been destroyed in Gaza,

Nearly all men cherish a fondness for some posture that they think shows off to best advantage the good points with which nature has endowed them. In Crevel’s case this pose consisted in crossing his arms like Napoleon, turning his head to show a three-quarter profile, and gazing, as the artist painting his portrait had made him gaze, at the horizon.

If anyone thinks of Martin Scarsden nowadays, they think of the actor who plays him on TV, the good looking rooster with the curly black hair, not him.

And how does one see video after video without concluding that this cruelty is the point, that there is no bottom to Israel’s campaign of extermination?

‘Who is this Hemingway person at all?’
‘A guy who keeps saying the same thing over and over until you begin to believe it must be good.’

I left her laughing. The sound was like a hen having hiccups.

The dehumanization of Palestinians is so thoroughly pervasive and so unquestioningly echoed by Western leaders that any effort to challenge Israel’s system of domination is met with perplexed reactions and uniform condemnation.

This historical context underscores that what is happening in Gaza and Palestine today is not an aberration but a continuation of a settler-colonial project that began over a century ago.

While Western double standards may come as no surprise, the degree to which this genocide has not only been downplayed but also actively facilitated is shocking for many. ……….Yet it feels naive, particularly when considering the context of entwined forces of imperial interests, white supremacy, and settler colonialism—dynamics that have long provided the Israeli regime with sweeping impunity.