Spam that actually made me think!
Mar. 6th, 2002 11:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
semperfionaWell it wasn't actually the content, but the fact that the header ("this is the result of your feedback form", which is fast growing to be standard in spam, and if I had my Em@iler again I'd use it to filter the stuff) was in German this time.
Donnerstag, it said, which is of course Thursday. I looked at the word for a while, remembered a conversation on wombat about Donner and Blitzen, and traced it backward to "Thunderday". "Thursday", of course, I always knew meant "Thor's Day", but it was just now that it occurred to me that "Thor" very likely also means thunder, or is at least derived from the same root.
So I went and checked at dictionary.com. thunder and Thor are indeed clearly related. It turns out that thin, astonish, detonate, intone, and tone are also related.
Because I have always had a wide vocabulary, people used to tease me in elementary school about reading the dictionary for fun, and I always denied it. It was true, of course, though I learned most words from context. If I did look something up, there was always something else interesting on the same page to read about. And then there's times like just now, when I knew perfectly well what the words were but looked them up anyway to read about their derivations.
Donnerstag, it said, which is of course Thursday. I looked at the word for a while, remembered a conversation on wombat about Donner and Blitzen, and traced it backward to "Thunderday". "Thursday", of course, I always knew meant "Thor's Day", but it was just now that it occurred to me that "Thor" very likely also means thunder, or is at least derived from the same root.
So I went and checked at dictionary.com. thunder and Thor are indeed clearly related. It turns out that thin, astonish, detonate, intone, and tone are also related.
Because I have always had a wide vocabulary, people used to tease me in elementary school about reading the dictionary for fun, and I always denied it. It was true, of course, though I learned most words from context. If I did look something up, there was always something else interesting on the same page to read about. And then there's times like just now, when I knew perfectly well what the words were but looked them up anyway to read about their derivations.
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no subject
Date: 2002-03-08 03:12 pm (UTC)Isn't etymology (that's the study of words, isn't it? If not, it's rather ironic that I messed up the word for the study of words) great?
no subject
Date: 2002-03-08 03:20 pm (UTC)Yes, it is the right word. And yes, it's great fun. The oddest things turn out to be related.