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Tag: language

You’re richer than you think

Levenson 3.-feature image Shakespeares-first-folio-at-ubc-library.-Courtesy-UBC-Library-Communications-e1642768765536 copy

“Our daily speech also overflows with Latin prefixes and suffixes, such as circum-, con-, contra-, e- or ex-, extra-, inter-, intra-, multi-, ob-, pre-, post-, sub-, super-, trans-, and ultra-. But we don’t need to be told what each of these prefixes means: we have acquired them subconsciously, by osmosis to use a Greek term, through a host of words such as transport, pre-natal, or supermarket.” Christopher Levenson contributes a Word in Your Ear essay to The British Columbia Review: Small Latin and Less Greek

‘But it’s not just horses’

Levenson 1. feature image Animals and Language.-Painting-at-Lascaux-caves-od-horses-deer-and-aurochs

“Other animal behaviours too live on in our everyday speech. Even if few of us have ever literally taken ‘the bull by the horns’ or ‘bought a pig in a poke’ (what is a poke in this instance? a bag or sack, nowadays an obsolete or dialect word, so the phrase means ‘to buy something without seeing or being able to test it’) most of us flounder at times or try ‘to feather our nests.’” Christopher Levenson urges us to contemplate the origin of such phrases as ‘free rein’ and ‘ride roughshod over’ in his A Word in Your Ear essay ‘Animals and Language.’

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