The words we use every day have a weird and complicated origin. The entire English language is a mishmash of German, French, and ancient Gaelic, and given just how adaptive humans are, it’s not surprising that some of the most common phrases used in the course of a day have some downright terrible origins. You’ll think twice before dusting off any hoary old chestnuts (like, for example, basket case) after reading this article. Still, black humor is still humor, right?
One of the classes in college that I took as an English major was History of the English Language. At the time, I absolutely hated it. It was all about phonemes and morphology and boring stuff about how we speak and how we learn language.
However, the part where the actually history of how English as we know it came to be thanks to the uneasy marriage of common language and the language of nobility? Absolutely fascinating. I would’ve liked more stuff like this, and less stuff about psycholinguistics.
Tags: English, language, unusual, phrases, words, history, weird