Books Blog: English Literature & Linguistics

Wordie goes by the tagline “Like Flickr, but without the photos” but it’s much more than that.  Until you’ve tried it out, you’d never believe social word-listing could be so fun.  Like shadenfreude?  So do 127 other people, right now.  The interface is clear and intuitive; you make lists of words.  Each word has its own permanent page, with comments, and lists the people who like that word.  You spend time trolling user lists, hunting words related to the ones you like.

Here’s what the interface looks like:

If you want to try it out, the Wordie homepage, my userpage, or my word list feed!

Dictionary.com does the etymology of this fabulous word for us:

Today’s word has taken an amazing journey through many different languages, where it acquired meanings ranging from “churl” to “king.” It originated as Proto-Germanic *karilaz. The Old Norse descendant of this word became karl “old man,” a word which spread throughout the Germanic languages as a man’s name. In Old High German, the ancestor of modern German, it became karal “man, husband” (today Kerl “guy, fellow”) whence it was borrowed into French as “Charles” and Medieval Latin as “Carolus.” Charlemagne [Charles le magne] “Charles the Great” had such an impact on Europe, that the Slavic nations borrowed his name as their general word for “king” (e.g. Serbian kralj, Russian korol’). In Old English, however, the word took a nose dive in the opposite direction: in ceorl the meaning dropped from “old man” to “peasant,” whose behavior the upper classes always considered “churlish.” Since the upper classes have historically determined how we speak, a churl is what he is today.

Churlish (a):  like a churl; rude; boorish.  And it has a fascinating sound.

I’m shocked that Juniper Bank, who run the credit Mastercards for Apple Corp., would make such a terrible pun on my name:

It’s almost as bad as when someone in 9th grade said, “Get to the Bäck of the class, Elliott.”

There’s a typo in one of today’s NYT Editorials, California’s Condom Bill:

You’d think that a newpaper like the New York Times could devote staff to proofreading articles before publication, but I guess not.  Even my little would have caught this 1-letter-off mistake.

I would like the define the prefix Fitz for you here:

The Anglo-French word for ’son’; chiefly Hist. in patronymic designations, in which it was followed by the name of a parent in the uninflected genitive. Some of these survive as surnames, e.g. Fitzherbert, Fitzwilliam, etc.; in later times new surnames of the kind have been given to the illegitimate children of royal princes. Also in 12-15th c. used occas. in adopted AF. phrases, beau fitz = ‘fair son’; fiz a putain = ‘whoreson’.

So when you’re watching Fitzgerald at the Olympics, you’re betting on a bastard!