Good morning! What’s for dinner?
From Michael Quinion’s review of Word Histories and Mysteries:
An attic, for example, is named after a classical architectural
style, behind which this topmost story was hidden; “caprice” in
origin refers to hedgehogs, not goats as it might seem and was
afterwards assumed; “dinner” derives from a French word meaning to
have breakfast; “fornication” refers to a vault, since prostitutes
in Rome plied their trade in arched cellars and similar places. A
“hearse” is, etymologically speaking, the same as the agricultural
implement called a harrow. The entry on “internecine” points out
that mistaken usage becomes conventional when everybody adopts it,
as has happened here, since the word had as its first English sense
“fought to the death”; however, Dr Johnson mistook its origins in
his dictionary and defined it as “endeavouring mutual destruction”,
which led to its modern sense. “Menu” is another oddity, since the
Latin original could mean “involving minute knowledge”, and was
applied in French in the sense of “detailed list”. “Nausea”, it
transpires, was originally and specifically seasickness, “pants”
for trousers derives indirectly from the name of a fourth-century
Roman Catholic saint in Venice, and a slogan is in origin a Scots
Gaelic war cry.
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