Sure :) I was referring to "oriented" as an adjective (as opposed to a verb). WordNet gives a nice example: "helping freshmen become oriented to college life" The word "oriented" seems to betray its etymology by refusing to conjure up any connections to the East. When w...

One more wine word. It's come up once before on this forum, but in a different context. Cru ( wikipedia ) (in France) a vineyard producing wine of high quality, sometimes classified by the government as either a Great Growth (Grand Cru) or a First Growth (Premier Cru). I've been dreaming up many cre...

I didn't even know this word existed until I noticed it in a book about logic/pragmatics/communication: On the other reading, (16) is false, since it attributes being not bald to the king of France, and there is no king of France around to be hirsute. Hirsute ( etym , dict ) 1621, from L. hirsutus &...

This word is interesting for the progression in derived words. At first, there was " orient ": from L. orientem (nom. oriens) "the rising sun, the east, part of the sky where the sun rises," originally "rising" (adj.) Which eventually became a verb: from Fr. s'orienter ...

Discussing Greek philosophy, my professor pointed out the etymology of this word: "It's from aliens speaking nonesense, 'bar bar bar!'" Barbarian ( etym , dict ) from Gk. barbaros "foreign, strange, ignorant," from PIE base *barbar- echoic of unintelligible speech of foreigners (...

I wish I could keep track of these forums more regularly... for now I've just been accumulating words to reccomend. Mostly for their interesting etymologies. Merlot a dark-blue grape used in winemaking, esp. in the Bordeaux region of France and in areas of Italy, Switzerland, and California. [Origin...

That makes a lot more sense. Thanks for humoring my ignorance

I should clarify, I'm not completely ignorant :) When I said "active killing" I was thinking more of "total annihilation". I understand plenty of situations where cultures have been repressed and populations massacred, but it seems like there's always traces... Perhaps I was misu...

Somehow I missed everything past the quote the first time I read it. :? I think the Portuguese appeals to me simply for the phonlogy... I have a lazy American accent, so it might be different elsewhere, but I'd expect the "tt" to be voiced (/d/) in English, which sounds ugly. But perhaps t...

Sorry, I didn't mean to ascribe the English words to you, I meant "suggest" in the sense "the ones you mentioned as potential translations".

I prefer the Portuguese over the English you suggest... How exactly would you go about "killing" a language, anyway? I can imagine a passive death of a language, but the active killing...?

I'm guessing everyone knows this word -- normally used in the nearly idomatic phrase "social pariah", but I just found out it has a great etymology: The word pariah, which can be used for anyone who is a social outcast, independent of social position, recalls a much more rigid social syste...

Amazing. My friend tells me she heard another etymology once, but can't remember. "Flying" and "flute" still sound questionable to me, but it's better than nothing. There's more weirdness here than I was expecting to stumble across...

I just checked etymonline earlier and didn't see any results, I must have mistyped something... Thanks Tim! It looks like "falute" is used rarely... what's interesting is the context: "falute too highly", "falute about myself", "...polite to falute in the first pla...

Actually, yeah! I found a few people using "low-falutin", and even "medium-falutin". It does appear by itself, very rarely, and seems to retain the connotation of "high-falutin".