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Every Etymology Is Wrong
Sep. 16th, 2021 11:42 amToday is Yom Kippur, so, if that is your thing, I hope it goes well for you and when it’s done, I hope that you get to have really nice food because you’ll probably be pretty hungry by then.
From our household’s perspective, Yom Kippur is one of a series of days early in the school year that the kids have off, and a day on which I feel mildly guilty about not knowing more about given all the Jewish relatives I have, but only pretty mildly, because it’s not like any of them are particularly observant.
I slept in, which was delightful, and the babysitter will be picking T. up, so we are off the hook for delivering him to track in the late afternoon, which is nice. As near as I can tell, there extent of our goals for the day are things like breakfast (accomplished!), lunch, snack, dinner, tea, coffee, 15 minutes of homework and a couple walks. And also things like Duo.
Today in Duo, I learned the word for meat or flesh: kød. Well, that’s a thing, now, isn’t it! Their word for pork has the same formation as Dutch, but it is a very different word. A little light research turns up the observation that the Scandinavian languages refer to cod (the meaty fish, and I refer to it that way with intent) as “torsk” or some close variant thereof. Dutch refers to cod as cabeljauw, which evocative, even picturesque and clearly does not come from the Scandinavian word. And while the Finnish word for meat is the somewhat mysterious “liha” (I’ll have to ask K. about that), the rest of those languages think some variation on kod is a good word to use for meat.
OK then! Let’s find out where the language people in English think we got the word cod!
It’s Middle English, possibly from cod meaning bag (as in cod-piece).
Seriously.
This is right up there with people pulling rags out of ancient tombs and tossing them aside, because, you know, “They’re just rags!”. I mean, it’s a thousand plus year old shirt, the oldest known to humanity at that point in time, but, “Just rags!” It’s right up there with excavating worker housing in Egypt and not recognizing the weights from the loom, sitting at the base of the wall. All the walls. Evenly spaced. With holes drilled in them. Gosh what’s this. Who could possibly know.
Cod’s a meaty fish. Some variant of “kod” is the Scandinavian-language-family word for meat. This can’t be an accident. I’m mildly curious about just how this happened, but only very mildly. Mostly, I am, once again, astonished at the breathtaking ignorance of academics.
From our household’s perspective, Yom Kippur is one of a series of days early in the school year that the kids have off, and a day on which I feel mildly guilty about not knowing more about given all the Jewish relatives I have, but only pretty mildly, because it’s not like any of them are particularly observant.
I slept in, which was delightful, and the babysitter will be picking T. up, so we are off the hook for delivering him to track in the late afternoon, which is nice. As near as I can tell, there extent of our goals for the day are things like breakfast (accomplished!), lunch, snack, dinner, tea, coffee, 15 minutes of homework and a couple walks. And also things like Duo.
Today in Duo, I learned the word for meat or flesh: kød. Well, that’s a thing, now, isn’t it! Their word for pork has the same formation as Dutch, but it is a very different word. A little light research turns up the observation that the Scandinavian languages refer to cod (the meaty fish, and I refer to it that way with intent) as “torsk” or some close variant thereof. Dutch refers to cod as cabeljauw, which evocative, even picturesque and clearly does not come from the Scandinavian word. And while the Finnish word for meat is the somewhat mysterious “liha” (I’ll have to ask K. about that), the rest of those languages think some variation on kod is a good word to use for meat.
OK then! Let’s find out where the language people in English think we got the word cod!
It’s Middle English, possibly from cod meaning bag (as in cod-piece).
Seriously.
This is right up there with people pulling rags out of ancient tombs and tossing them aside, because, you know, “They’re just rags!”. I mean, it’s a thousand plus year old shirt, the oldest known to humanity at that point in time, but, “Just rags!” It’s right up there with excavating worker housing in Egypt and not recognizing the weights from the loom, sitting at the base of the wall. All the walls. Evenly spaced. With holes drilled in them. Gosh what’s this. Who could possibly know.
Cod’s a meaty fish. Some variant of “kod” is the Scandinavian-language-family word for meat. This can’t be an accident. I’m mildly curious about just how this happened, but only very mildly. Mostly, I am, once again, astonished at the breathtaking ignorance of academics.