I was reading an article about the anachronistic dialog of madmen and in it was a mention of how the term "window of opportunity" didn't show up in print until 1980.

It seems overly coincidental to be so close to the spelling of a man that once ran one of the largest "gangs" in human history. I can't find anything online that actually makes the connection between word roots and Ghengis Khan himself.

My friend was playing a Finnish game where there was a sheep (referred to as a "lammas" ?) and I thought that this was very interesting.

My grandmother used to call eye-boogers "ziggis" and I cant find the origin. Her native language is Swiss German. Any ideas?

My grandma used to call a bag of random bits and bobs for me to take home from her house as my bag of hidey-ho. As in “don’t forget your bag of hidey-ho I put together for you!” Has anyone else ever heard this? For reference my grandma was born in 1929, and grew up in Alberta, Canada and then moved to Saskatchewan, Canada as a young adult. My sister and I also call a bag of random stuff hidey-ho and we can’t find anything online as to its origins. Are we just weird Canuck’s?🤣 Any help is greatly appreciated!

Edited to correct my mis-spelling of Canuck!

I think I've discovered a new spelling rule!! If a word ends in '-ve' and has a 'C' in it, it follows 'EI' (Receive, Deceive, Perceive). If it doesn’t have a 'C,' it follows 'IE' (Achieve, Believe). Has anyone noticed this before?

"Appear" and "apparent" both come from the Latin "apparere", so why does "appear" have an "e" in it? This drives me nuts sometimes because I forget that "apparent" doesn't have an "e" and a lot of apps don't know to suggest the right spelling. They just get confused and start coughing up all kinds of unrelated junk.

I hope I'm in the right sub for this, I apologize if not. Thanks for your time reading!

I used to be a visiting elderly care giver and would do in home visits and care. I had a client a few years ago who was Jewish and I had a wonderful relationship with her. She taught me a lot and I'll miss her greatly.

Anyways, I was making her breakfast one day and somehow managed to catch and redrop an egg 5x times in a row before it finally fell and broke on the ground. I sighed and said "I'm sorry Miss Smith, I'm such a Klutz". And she huffed and reared back with a "You are NOT" in a sort of shock? I apologized if I said something offensive and went back to my day. It was dropped as quick as it happened and I never said the word again around her. She taught me many Jewish words in her time with me, but I never brought up the word again, afraid I'd offend her. She developed dementia in my time with her and was already starting when I met her. It was difficult to hold long or deep conversations with her for more than a few minutes.

Many years later I still refer to myself as a klutz when I am alone, but never out loud to others as I still can't figure out if it was offensive. I grew up being called a klutz and a butter fingers (lovingly) my entire life. But, over time I've learned my family used many words/terms that were racist in nature or offensive to other cultures. I've had to scrub my vernacular quite a bit in my life. But I never could find anything online correlating klutz with bad connotations.

Was it just a misunderstanding or is there some historical context I'm missing? Thank you for your help!

With the ongoing mass deportations, there is a sense of schadenfreude in the US and it is palpable even among those who could be ensnared by it. With the gravity, uncertainty, and unfamiliarity, of what is happening now as a driving force, and the unfamiliar emotions, senses, and situations it engenders the ingredients - the conditions are rife for the cauldron of language to come to a boil, and crystallize new concepts into new words, enhance existing words with new connotations, or give new relevance to words once obscure.

Germans, in my opinion, have always shown a deftness at using language not only to capture new concepts, but to sanitize problematic ones. Thus I wonder whether a world like "schadenfreude" has a backstory accompanying it's technical etymology, perhaps something similar to what a large swath of the US population is feeling while standing at this moment in time.

EDIT: I've been receiving a lot of blowback for this post, which I did not expect. I asked the question because of an essay I'm trying to write. This is an etymology subreddit and so I didn't think my politics was relevant. Mass deportations is an issue that affects me because I am it's target. Enough said.

One of my kids today asked me if "Naval" and "Navel" have a common ancestor. I did a bit of poking around, and I can't see any links, but I'm far from an expert.

I can see Naval coming from the Latin "Navis" ("Ship"), but I'm struggling to identify a source for "Navel", so I can't quite validate my claim that it's 'just one of those coincidences' Any ideas, Reddit?

Are there any good resources to learn about the sounds shifts from Latin to the modern romance languages? Most of what I've found seems to focus on a couple consonant shifts and one or two vowels shifts, but I'd like something that goes further in depth.

So I’ve been wondering why the slavic languages dont have a word for father that descended from ph₂tḗr and instead have something like bulgarian bashta and otets (which is an archaic word in bulgarian).

Did it experience a clipping process (mutual→mut) and a vowel letter change (mut→moot)?

This pops up a lot, like all the time, at least to me. I find tons of sources pointing out that it’s false, while other say it has racist origins. Could anybody explain it better than my seemingly unimpressive Google-Fu skills

So for a bit of context I was watching a profile video of a murderer and the term Sadism kept on coming up. I know what it means but I had an etymological strike and had to know where the term came from. I've found it came from the French author Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade who was of course the Marquis (or less commonly Count) of Sade but I cannot find a placename in France called Sade?

Anyone any idea why the marquis of Sade? Is this a historical area?

If so, what's the etymology of the placename?

I had a humorous musing that people that live in Sade must get pissed off everytime they hear the term Sadism but, alas, I'm at a dead end.

In many American accents (and possibly others), the word "disguise" is pronounced more like /dɪsˈkaɪz/ (or "diskize") rather than the British /dɪsˈɡaɪz/ (or "disgize"). The same pattern occurs with "disgust." Why is this the case? Are there other words with similar pronunciation shifts?

Thought about finding a Phonetics forum to ask this question, but maybe this will garner at least some answers.

Any thoughts as to the origins of Traffic and Travel and how they relate to each other? Travel seems to predate Traffic, but beyond that I can’t find a specific link between the two. I’m mostly interested in how the labiodental fricatives (f and v) became severed in this instance. Why isn’t it Travic, Travel, and Traverse (or Traffic, Traffel, and Trafferse). It’s likely that one or the other was used and then misheard/picked up by a language without that particular phoneme. Anyone have any citations for this?

Two objects can be flush with one another, a face can be flushed, so can a toilet. You can flush animals out of the woods or get a flush in poker. How did this happen and how many meanings does it have?

Is that how it works?

I'm talking about the phrases "throw down the gauntlet," and "take up the gauntlet." From my understanding to throw one's gauntlet down is to issue a challenge or a duel, and to take up the gauntlet is to accept a challenge or duel.

Does anyone know the history behind these phrases? And do I pick up the challengers gauntlet? Or do I throw my own down? Who picks up whose?

Thanks for your consideration.

I am intrested to hear your thoughts on the origin of the last name, potential meaning and etymology of it.

A close relative on my maternal side a few generations back, links to the family of Ballizany. The photographer Wilhelm Ballizany from Kleve Germany, following this line it seems to move to the Netherlands. Where I can track it back to Wilhelm Gustaaf Friedrich Ballizany and his father Theodor.

This side of the family has travelled to what once was “Dutch East Indies”, now Indonesia. Which brings me to my idea/thought that the last name Ballizany could have had smth to do with that. It is just an odd name for the time and place, I keep wondering about it’s potential origin.

I am intrested to hear your thoughts!

Hi, I have been wondering for a while why the ال (al-) article from Arabic was preserved in many loanwords specifically in Romance languages of Iberia (English also does this but way less frequently). I'm talking about how words like:

-Portuguese: alfombra, almôndega, azeite, aldea, arroz, álcool

-Spanish: alfombra, albóndiga, aceite, albahaca, alcalde, aldea, arroz, alcohol

-Catalan: alfàbrega, alcalde, aldea, atzucac, arròs, alcohol

-English: alcohol

I have been taking a look at the wiktionary and in many cases, languages like Somali, Persian or others don't usually preserve the article (in the cases I have seen, I might be wrong). Why could be that?

And the main question is, why is it so prevalent that we preseve the arabic article while, for example, English people don't preserve the Spanish article in all the hispanisms English has or other languages preserve the "the" when borrowing words from English?

Soul (as in inner self), Sol- (as in alone or sole), and Sol (as in Latin for sun)

I’ve seen conflicting posts regarding whether these are related. But some don’t have any sources and are a few years old. Anybody have any sources on any combination of these three?