“His intimate friends called him ‘Candle-ends,’ / And his enemies ‘Toasted-cheese.’”

[larryhammer]

Words, words, words:

Explaining affixes with koalas. (via)

On the linguistic importance of lox. (via)

Epigrammatic Abraham Lincoln.

---L.

Subject quote from The Hunting of the Snark, Fit the First, Lewis Carroll.

Comments

[sovay]

I can't decide whether I like the lox or the Lincoln better. I think I will not choose.

[larryhammer]

A wise choice. Have a bagel.

[thistleingrey]

I find the lox thing suspect because some sound changes have fallen together in order to make that article possible. It hasn't always had that sound. Support: in modern German, it's Lachs, which is nearly the same set of phonemes. I think English has re-borrowed it from Yiddish.

[sovay]

I think English has re-borrowed it from Yiddish.

I believe English did. (That komets-alef is a giveaway.) I didn't think the article's argument was that lox had come straight down through Old English from PIE days, though, just that its wide array of cognates suggest that it's ridiculously old.

[thistleingrey]

Agreed, it's old--but "people have a need for this lexeme" strikes me as different from "in English for nearly as long as we have written attestation," given the gaps in the historical record and the interesting influxes.