Irish laments, burning embers, and the best vs. the worst |
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MOST POPULAR THIS WEEK LIVING LAMENT We’re starting this week’s newsletter with a shoutout to @christut8 over on Twitter. Apologies, Chris, for blowing your phone up earlier this week. It all began on Tuesday, when the Irish word beochaoineadh popped up on the HH Twitter feed. Alas, Irish isn’t an HH strong point (check out @theirishfor for Twitter brilliance along that front). But this was a word too good to ignore: a beochaoineadh is an “elegy for the living”, as we put it on Twitter. “A sorrowful lament for someone who is alive, but who has gone away or is dearly missed.” Again, Irish isn’t an HH strong point. We’ve tried. Honestly, we have. But Irish—wow, seriously, leave some vowel clusters for someone else. And since when is mh pronounced “w”? And uío pronounced “ee”? It’s all too much. Time for a lie down. But thanks to some lovely people in the Twitter comments, we now know beochaoineadh is pronounced “byoh-kwee-new”. Etymologically, its origins lie in the Irish beo, meaning “alive”, and caoineadh, meaning “lamentation” or “weeping”. But back to @christut8. On Wednesday, he quote tweeted our beochaoineadh tweet with nothing more than the words “BARACK OBAMA”. Never a truer word, indeed. So we gave Chris a retweet. But then, so did JK Rowling. And once 14 million people get hold of something—well, Chris, we apologise. Your Twitter mentions will never be the same again. Nor will your phone’s battery power. RIP Chris’s phone. Time for a beochaoineadh for it. Elsewhere this week we found out: |
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POPULAR THIS WEEK THE BEST OF TIMES A curious fact cropped up on HH this week: when used as verbs, best and worst can mean the same thing. And that led to lots of raised eyebrows about whether or not worst can be used as a verb, and—well, just what on earth that fact actually meant. Best the verb—as in “he bested him”—is by far the more familiar of the two, but it’s only been with us since the early 1800s. Etymologically, it’s just a (fairly clumsy, when you come to think about it) extension of the adjective best. Worst the verb—as in “she worsted her”—is comparatively much less familiar today, but is by far the older of the two. Like best, etymologically it’s just an extension of the adjective worst but it first appeared as a verb two centuries earlier, in the early seventeenth century. Originally it meant “to make worse” or “to damage”, but by the mid 1600s worst was being used to mean “to get the better of” or “to defeat”—the meaning we would now more often attach to best today. |
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POPULAR THIS WEEK FOREVER EMBER On Valentine’s Day the Scots word greeshoch popped up on HH—defined as both “a fire that burns hot without flames” and, figuratively, “a secret burning romance or warm affection”. Etymologically, that’s a Scots corruption of the Gaelic word grìosach, meaning “ember” or more loosely, “fireside” or “fireplace”. That word in turn comes from the Gaelic for “fire”, grìs—which is itself the origin of another Scots word, greesh, for a stone platform or mantel that allowed a fireplace to be positioned further forward than the chimney flue above it. The Scottish National Dictionary dates greeshoch no further back than the early nineteenth century, and like seemingly all Scots dialect words it was used at least once by Sir Walter Scott, in a collection of Scottish minstrelry dating from 1802. That date would suggest it was in use locally earlier than the SND suggests, and from there the figurative use of greeshoch to mean “a secret burning romance” emerged in the 1820s. |
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AND FINALLY... ANAGRAMS #26 Four more tricky anagrams to round things off this week: each of the words below can be rearranged to spell another much more familiar dictionary word. What are they? UNSASHED UNSTATES UNSPRAYED UNSTABLER Last week’s solution: NICHE, ENIGMA, PENSIVE, VALENTINE |
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