Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Online Etymology Dictionary

This freakin' rocks!

I haven't done any writing in a really long time and find myself pretty rusty, so I've got wordage on the brain, and have been mulling over all the words that I love. Trying to remember roots gives me nightmares of my freshman English teacher, who continually mangled my name and made us spend three fucking months reading The Odyssey (Homer, I hate you). I did a quick search to see if I could find a way to stop hearing the context in Mrs. Faux-Frenchypants' voice, and found The Online Etymology Dictionary. Sweet! I immediately looked up "malapropism" because it's got a fun history:
1849, from Mrs. Malaprop, character in Sheridan's play "The Rivals" (1775), noted for her ridiculous misuse of large words (i.e. "contagious countries" for "contiguous countries"), her name coined from malapropos (adv.), 1668, a borrowing from Fr. mal à propos "inopportunely, inappropriately," lit. "badly for the purpose," from mal (see mal-) + proposer "propose."
Heh, how very American that George Bush has never been referred to as "Mr. Malaprop."

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