Squirrely etymology

So ... the German word for what we call in English a squirrel, translates to oak-kitten. Cute.

More Latin learning

I glanced over at the Latin side of the page in Phaedrus this morning and made another discovery. Not quite as fun as last night's, though.

"Columbae" is "dove" in Latin.

Could it be, could it be -- yes, columbine means dove-like, my dictionary assures me. As in the flower. And thus, too, the Colorado city where so much sadness happened a few years ago.

"Galamb" is dove in Hungarian -- did the Magyar folk borrow the word from the Catholic priests who settled among them after their conversion to Christianity?

And in Spanish today, the word is "paloma." As in the city in California. Same Latin derivation, of course.

The risque world of etymology

We all know that English is just mutant German with a crust of Latin and a little spice tossed in from other languages of the world.

In many cases, perfectly good old English words were eventually replaced by Latin ones for reasons known today only to etymologists. Winston Churchill famously hated this phenomenon.

I discovered an odd example of such a transfer tonight. In a staid old book of Roman fables -- you can't get much more academic than the Loeb Classical Library -- I had no expectation of such a discovery, but there it was, and a dictionary confirmed it.

It seems that the word "yard" once served as a standard, English male, umm, anatomical term, one which we have replaced today with a Latin word that began, most oddly, as the term for "tail."

Gives painful new meaning to the title of that recent movie, Stomp the Yard.