Aug26

fighting words.

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our founding fathers irked england by inventing american english

thomas jefferson is credited with coining over 100 words — more than any other president. among the words the third president introduced are “indecipherable,” “belittle,” and “pedicure,” the latter of which means to care for the feet and toenails. “Pedicure” was one of several words that Jefferson borrowed from the French after spending many years in Paris.

next time you get your pedicure,

you’ll have TJ to thank for bringing this word to us,

otherwise you wouldn’t have known what service to ask for

when you booked your appointment. 

—

‘where can i find a man who has forgotten words so i can have a word with him?’

-zhuangzi

 

 

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source credits: VOA, Saturday Evening Post

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67 responses »

    • great post and I think you should repost it, Pete. we really have hacked it up and should just call it our own language at this point. yes, now with social media a lot of things have crossed over but I still love the English spelling of English and appreciate how the Canadians honor (honour?) that.

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    • Pete, I only just realised (not with a z) that you have your own blog and I subbed. I also strongly defend the English ways and although my E wasn’t that great when I lived in Canada at the beginning of my adult life, I was told more than once: Oh, you speak such a great Oxford English…. poor little me didn’t even know what ‘they’ were talking about at that time – and I was known to tell all and sundry that NO, my English is just the school English and that I was never at Oxford uni!

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  9. I love strange words. I once posted a poem series of ABC of Strange words.There are some weird ones out there. If only I could pronounce them. If only I could find them. All hidden in the bowels of WordPress.

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    • though maybe because he picked up this ‘habit’ in Paris, he might with a bit of a Parisian pink? there seems to be no record of this detail and it was highly likely that they didn’t have the creative names for polish colors that they now have. maybe ‘moulin rouge?’ or ‘ooh lala?’

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  23. big smile here! i have some very large unwritten dictionaries in my head with new and unknown words emitted by HH in ‘franglais’, ‘swenglish’ (swiss & english), pure inventions, and more.

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  25. “It wasn’t until I moved back to the States that I realized how much I had missed the way Americans talk, especially in small towns. I likes the pacing of their stories, and I liked being able to pick up the nuances of the language. Once, when I visited my parents in Missouri, I took a shuttle bus from the airport, and the driver was a South Carolinian with a huge white beard that tumbled across his chest like a snowdrift. I told him I had been in China until recently.

    : Do you speak mandolin?” he asked .

    Peter Hessler: The New Yorker, April 19, 2010

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