What do adverse and averse mean? The adjectives adverse and averse are related. Both come from the Latin root vert- meaning “to turn.” In Latin the word adversus meant “turned toward” and “hostile” and is a direct root of adverse. Averse, on the other hand, emerges from the Latin word aversus, which meant “turned away.” Today, adverse is rarely used to describe people but rather to describe effects …
The letter B was part of the Phoenician alphabet more than 3000 years ago in 1000 BCE. At that time, the letter was called beth and looked a little different, but it made the sound of b and was second in the alphabet. The shape of the letter resembled the floor plan of a house, and the word beth meant “house.” This is pictured below. In Hebrew, the letter was called beth, bet, or bayt which also …
There is quite a bit of mystery surrounding the letter A. From its prestigious first place position to its interesting shape, tracing the first letter of the English alphabet uncovers a history that begins with, of all things, an ox. Where does the letter A come from? The letter A is derived from the Phoenician letter aleph—a western Semitic word referring to the aforementioned beast of burden. Aleph …
Dictionaries vary in particulars about the definition of cliché, but they all agree that a cliché is not a good thing. Despite the low regard in which we all hold clichés, we all use them, certainly in speech, if not in writing. Is there a contradiction here? Yup. Formally, a cliché is “a trite, stereotyped expression; a sentence or phrase, usually expressing a popular or common thought …
Can you imagine a world in which the sounds of G and C were both represented by the letter C? Try to imacine it. Believe it or not, for much of their history, the sounds of C and G were represented by the same symbol. Eventually, however, both sounds received their own differentiated symbols. Both G and C have their origin in the Phoenician letter gimel, …
Do you ever stop and look at the shape of our alphabet? Each letter looks natural to us now, but all those lines and circles have unique histories. It’s easy to make assumptions that our letters make sense, that they developed in some orderly logical way, and one reasonable assumption would be that P and R are related to each other based on their form.
There was no letter U in the alphabet. Well, that’s not the entire story. There was the sound for the letter we call U, but it didn’t look like U. It looked like V. The Classical Latin alphabet had only 23 letters, not the 26 that we have today. (This is why the W looks like a double V but is pronounced like a double …
Metaphors and similes are figures of speech used to add flair and humor to a phrase. These popular rhetorical devices are all well and good, but sometimes you just need to get to the point; enter hypocatastasis. What is hypocatastasis? Linguistically, both a hypocatastasis and a metaphor imply “a resemblance, representation or comparison.” However, hypocatastasis packs more of a punch than a metaphor because it uses …
