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"Doug also is put out by everyone else's "grim and humorless" tone. Here's a philological tidbit: both "grim" and "Christian" arise from the Indo-European "ghrei-," meaning "to rub." Other derivatives are "grisly," "grime," and "cream." We are, it seems, not only rubbing one another the wrong way philosophically, but linguistically, and from a common root."
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Donald er... Melynda thanks for the little aside. I just love historical semantics and grammaticalization. It all stems back to my days in the public school where we "diaphramed" sentences exhaustively hour after hour until we put the "facilitator" to sleep with our sighs.
The origin of words -etymology- continues to fascinate me though. When you pointed out the "Indo-European" origin of "ghrei-" I just had to go see what else it was 'kin to.
Allow me just a few (you'all can google ghrei- on your own, just don't google me I'm not in there)
from one source on the web (http://amor.rz.hu-berlin.de/~h2816i3x/LexSemantik4.pdf)
came these little jewels. These just fit the past conversations of
car washes, breasts and other such stuff.....
" For example, it turns out that the words cream, cretin, grime and Christ are etymologi-cally related, that is, they all go back to a common root. In this case its a word for ointment, with an Indo-European root ghrei-. Christ is the Greek word for ‘the anointed one’. Cretin originally meant Christian, cf. French chretien, an euphemism first used in Switzerland for idiots. Cream refers to the fatty or oily parts of milk, and grime to oily dirt.
see how it works ... in reverse order...
grime = the need for car wash
cream = the need for topless women
chretien = the need for idiots
Cretin = the need for Christians
you get the idea... let's see what else they said...
"Another example: The word bead goes back to a word for prayer (cf. German Gebet), via the custom to use chains of beads to count prayers. The term bikini for ‘a scanty two-piece beach garment worn by women’ (OED) is motivated by the Bikini atoll, the site of an atomic test of the USA in 1946, which got considerably reduced in size during the process.
I found it amazing and humorous how many words from this root applied to our topics of late. The other site that was just a hoot* can be found at: http://www.geocities.com/etymonline/g4etym.htm
*hoot = to laugh, or southern expression of female breasts, as in "hooters" - also a great place for hot wings.
lemeno Doug!
ps. I will supply the Bar-B-Que sauce for the picnic if you have one.....