• @[email protected]
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    611 year ago

    Etymology of the word gargoyle, for anyone else who read the linked list in its entirety and found that gargoyle is not on it:

    https://www.etymonline.com/word/gargoyle

    Rather than the sound of water, it seems to refer to the throat of the statue through which water passes, which sounds like gargle in several languages. Several sites say it’s an onomatopoeia for the statue gargling water but I can’t find that reference specifically, except that the root words for gargle from Latin might be an onomatopoeia for the sound of gargling.

    If the statue is purely ornamental without the function for water to pass through it, it’s called a grotesque, chimera, or boss, so obviously I’m going to call them all bosses now.

      • @[email protected]
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        81 year ago

        Haha, I really want to show someone around New York or some larger city and point up and just be like “and you can see four bosses up there” and then get to explain what I mean.

        I wonder if those lions in front of libraries are bosses too, or if bosses have to be rooftop statues?

    • Ada
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      101 year ago

      Garganta means throat in Spanish, so I’ve learnt something about the origins of that word now :)

  • @[email protected]
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    481 year ago

    Sandwiches are named after the Earl of Sandwich right? Have there been further developments?

  • Smuuthbrane
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    381 year ago

    The sandwich is named for the sound of gargling dry white bread and overly processed deli meats that sandwich eaters made before the invention of garlic aoli.

  • @[email protected]
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    1361 year ago

    Also, it’s only a true gargoyle if it comes from the gargling region of France. Anything else is just a sparkling grotesque.

  • themeatbridge
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    511 year ago

    Onomatopoeia is itself an onomatopoeia because that’s the sound it makes when you say the word.

  • @[email protected]
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    1 year ago

    ostrachise

    Huh? I thoght ancient greeks played with the idea of democracy but were mostly monarchistic?

  • Flying Squid
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    271 year ago

    The weird thing about the origin of the word sandwich is that everyone had been eating them for centuries, but one day the Earl of Sandwich orders one and they say, “it takes too long to say bread-and-meat, let’s just call it a sandwich.”

    By the way, no one knows for sure the etymology of ‘squid.’

      • Flying Squid
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        61 year ago

        I don’t know what “squyrde” is, but it doesn’t show up in any etymological source I’ve ever seen.

        For example:

        squid (n.)

        “ten-armed marine mollusk, cuttlefish,” 1610s, a word of unknown origin. Klein’s sources suggest it is a sailors’ variant of squirt and so called for the “ink” it jets.

        https://www.etymonline.com/word/squid

    • Dr. Bob
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      41 year ago

      There are a bunch of animal names like that. Notably “dog” and “chicken” just showed up without any real source. In middle English we have hounds, and fowls/cocks/hens. It’s strange for domestic animals that have been around forever to get renamed afor no apparent reason.

  • @[email protected]
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    621 year ago

    Sandwiches are named after a Welsh peasant dish that originally consisted of witch meat between two bricks of baked sand. It was terrible and offered little nutritional value, but was very popular due to the great availability of witch meat and lack of any real alternatives for nourishment.

      • @[email protected]
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        511 year ago

        Additional fun fact: “sandwich” is a degraded version of the original Welsh spelling, which is “syynndwrrrccchhchch,” and which was originally pronounced “klerb.”

      • @[email protected]
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        11 year ago

        Those are two different words though. If the OP had said they were related I wouldn’t protest because they likely are. But they stated it as a fact, which we do not know to be true.