WendYou Rarely See A Wend Without A Way. You Can Wend Your Way Through A Crowd Or Down A Hill, But No

Words that Survived by Getting Fossilized in Idioms

wend You rarely see a “wend” without a “way.” You can wend your way through a crowd or down a hill, but no one wends to bed or to school. However, there was a time when English speakers would wend to all kinds of places. “Wend” was just another word for “go” in Old English. The past tense of “wend” was “went” and the past tense of “go” was “gaed.” People used both until the 15th century, when “go” became the preferred verb, except in the past tense where “went” hung on, leaving us with an outrageously irregular verb.

deserts The “desert” from the phrase “just deserts” is not the dry and sandy kind, nor the sweet post-dinner kind. It comes from an Old French word for “deserve,” and it was used in English from the 13th century to mean “that which is deserved.” When you get your just deserts, you get your due. In some cases, that may mean you also get dessert, a word that comes from a later French borrowing.

eke If we see “eke” at all these days, it’s when we “eke out” a living, but it comes from an old verb meaning to add, supplement, or grow. It’s the same word that gave us “eke-name” for “additional name,” which later, through misanalysis of “an eke-name” became “nickname.”

sleight “Sleight of hand” is one tricky phrase. “Sleight” is often miswritten as “slight” and for good reason. Not only does the expression convey an image of light, nimble fingers, which fits well with the smallness implied by “slight,” but an alternate expression for the concept is “legerdemain,” from the French léger de main,“ literally, “light of hand.” “Sleight” comes from a different source, a Middle English word meaning “cunning” or “trickery.” It’s a wily little word that lives up to its name.

roughshod Nowadays we see this word in the expression “to run/ride roughshod” over somebody or something, meaning to tyrannize or treat harshly. It came about as a way to describe the 17th century version of snow tires. A “rough-shod” horse had its shoes attached with protruding nail heads in order to get a better grip on slippery roads. It was great for keeping the horse on its feet, but not so great for anyone the horse might step on.

fro The “fro” in “to and fro” is a fossilized remnant of a Northern English or Scottish way of pronouncing “from.” It was also part of other expressions that didn’t stick around, like “fro and till,” “to do fro” (to remove), and “of or fro” (for or against).

hue The “hue” of “hue and cry,” the expression for the noisy clamor of a crowd, is not the same “hue” as the term we use for color. The color one comes from the Old English word híew, for “appearance.” This hue comes from the Old French hu or heu, which was basically an onomatopoeia, like “hoot.”

lurch When you leave someone “in the lurch,” you leave them in a jam, in a difficult position. But while getting left in the lurch may leave you staggering around and feeling off-balance, the “lurch” in this expression has a different origin than the staggery one. The balance-related lurch comes from nautical vocabulary, while the lurch you get left in comes from an old French backgammon-style game called lourche. Lurch became a general term for the situation of beating your opponent by a huge score. By extension it came to stand for the state of getting the better of someone or cheating them.

umbrage “Umbrage” comes from the Old French ombrage (shade, shadow), and it was once used to talk about actual shade from the sun. It took on various figurative meanings having to do with doubt and suspicion or the giving and taking of offense. To give umbrage was to offend someone, to “throw shade.” However, these days when we see the term “umbrage” at all, it is more likely to be because someone is taking, rather than giving it.

shrift We might not know what a shrift is anymore, but we know we don’t want to get a short one. “Shrift” was a word for a confession, something it seems we might want to keep short, or a penance imposed by a priest, something we would definitely want to keep short. But the phrase “short shrift” came from the practice of allowing a little time for the condemned to make a confession before being executed. So in that context, shorter was not better.

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When Swinton And Cho Talk Race, The Point's Lost In Translation

Two celebrities had an email exchange about race that seemed polite but was loaded with subtext. When the exchange became public, the conversation about who was wrong looked frustratingly familiar.

It was a bizarre Hollywood kerfuffle.

Over the weekend, the publicist for actress Tilda Swinton released an email exchange between Swinton and comedian Margaret Cho about race and casting in Hollywood. Swinton was one of the stars of Dr. Strange and played a character, The Ancient One, who had always been Asian in the comic books on which the movie was based. Swinton had reached out to Cho, an outspoken critic of “whitewashing” in the film industry.

After the email exchange, Cho went on a podcast and characterized the brief conversation as a “fight” in which she said Swinton essentially asked her to make the criticism go away.

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I’m siiiiiick and feeling sorry for myself 

but! my @omgcpsecretsanta​ gift has been cheering me up! A beautiful French rolling pin for all my pie and croissant baking! :D :D Bitty will be keeping me company when I bake now, as will my secret santa! I just noticed that it’s actually from Canada, too, so Jack and Ransom will be well represented as well. :)

so, thank you SO MUCH @lesgallys​ ! by the way, your package arrived well in advance, but I’d given you my folks’ address just in case, and so I didn’t open it till Christmas. And then I didn’t even feel well enough to post my excitement, even though it had cheered me up! 

also, your dropping by my tumblr to chat, especially that first time with the election awfulness, was wonderful. I wasn’t sure if I could post publicly or reply privately, so I erred on the side of caution, but it really was a great lead-up to the holidays at a time of finishing a LOT of classwork and obligations to others all at once. :D :D :D