Sunday language linkage.
Dec. 30th, 2012 08:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sister_luckI'll post the last Capturing December pictures tomorrow, I promise - still haven't the right subject for "words" yet, but first, without much further ado, my language links for this week.
I knew the folk etymology that Pumpernickel was supposed to be about Napoleon's horse: "bon pour Nicole" and not fit for human consumption. Turns out that the story is much older than that. Find out more here.
The whole nine yards is subject to many folk etymologies, too - but this article in the New York Times tells us that it was six before it was nine yards - just like cloud nine and cloud seven, sometimes numbers are just random numbers. (In German it is Wolke Sieben.) Of course, the comments are full of more theories of why it's six and nine yards!
That's it for today!
I knew the folk etymology that Pumpernickel was supposed to be about Napoleon's horse: "bon pour Nicole" and not fit for human consumption. Turns out that the story is much older than that. Find out more here.
The whole nine yards is subject to many folk etymologies, too - but this article in the New York Times tells us that it was six before it was nine yards - just like cloud nine and cloud seven, sometimes numbers are just random numbers. (In German it is Wolke Sieben.) Of course, the comments are full of more theories of why it's six and nine yards!
That's it for today!
