63: Where to get your English etymologies

When you look at a series of words that sorta sound like each other,  such as pesto, paste, and pasta, it’s easy to start wondering if they  might have originated with a common root word. Etymologists take these  hunches and painstakingly track them down through the historical record  to find out which ones are true and which ones aren’t -- in this case,  that paste and pasta have a common ancestor, but pesto comes from  somewhere else.

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch  and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about English etymology! We talk about  where the etymological parts of dictionaries come from, the gaps in our  knowledge based on the biases of historical sources, how you can become  the Etymology Friend (with help from Etymonline), and which kinds of  etymologies should immediately make you put your debunking hat on  (spoiler: anything containing an acronym or formatted like an image  meme. Just saying.). Now you too can have etymology x-ray vision! (Aka,  where to quickly look up etymologies on your phone!).

Read the transcript here https://lingthusiasm.com/post/670768175028289536/transcript-episode-63-where-to-get-your-english

Announcements:

Thanks  for celebrating our 5 year anniversary with us! We loved seeing you  share all your favourite Lingthusiasm episodes and moments. We’re  looking forward to another year of sharing linguistic joy with you.

This  month’s bonus episode is about linguistics olympiads! These involve a  series of fun linguistic puzzles, sort of like sudoku for linguistics.  Since linguistics isn't commonly taught in high schools, the puzzles  can't assume any prior linguistics knowledge, so they're either logic  puzzles as applied to language or they teach you basic linguistics  concepts in the preamble to the question, making them great for ling  fans as well. Alas, we were not in high school recently enough to  participate in any olympiads ourselves, so we also talk about how people  can get involved if you're not a high school student, from helping to  host a session at a local high school or university to just doing  puzzles for fun and interest (they're available for free with answer  keys on the olympiad websites, plus there was a recent book that came  out compiling some of them). Plus: how Lauren has made a few olympiad  puzzles herself!

Get access to this and over 50 more bonus  Lingthusiasm episodes (and help keep the show ad-free) by supporting  Lingthusiasm on Patreon. www.patreon.com/lingthusiasm

For links  to everything in this episode visit the shownotes page:  https://lingthusiasm.com/post/670767938518827008/episode-63-where-to-get-your-english-etymologies