Content tagged with “language” under “Stuff I Looked Up”

“‘Kill’ is a borrowed word from Dutch. In that language it means ‘body of water’ or, more often, ‘creek.’ Thus, names like Fresh Kills, West Kill, Peeksill, Fishkill, usually refer to a nearby body of water. This usage is common in Upstate New York. Oddly, the Catskill Mountains might be a…”

“ This is an accented character, which you mostly see in languages other than U.S. English. French, for example, uses several diacritics, like in ‘façade’ and ‘café’. Vietnamese uses accented characters in almost every word. ”

“ This is the phonetic sound that results when two vowels are next to each other: ‘ai’ and ‘ea’ and ‘ou,’ for example. It’s pronounced ‘diff-thong.’ ”

“ This is a prepositional phrase from Latin which means ‘with.’ So ‘X-cum-Y’ means ‘X with Y.’ Incidentally, this is where the degree honors come from: cum laude: ‘with praise’ magna cum laude: ‘with great praise’ summa cum laude: ‘with highest praise’ ”

“ French for ‘I don’t know what.’ It means some quality that you find appealing, but cannot describe in words. ”

“For example, if often takes the form of a place name being used to refer to (1) a significant event that happened at that place; or (2) an organization, institution, industry, or concept associated with that place. Examples: ‘The White House’ to refer to a presidential administration ‘Wall Street’…”

“It’s a French suffix meaning ‘city,’ ‘town,’ or ‘farm.’ The French were allies during the American Revolution. From Wikipedia : France’s help was a major and decisive contribution towards the United States’ eventual victory and independence in the war. This led to positive French sentiment after…”