Haggard Hawks 🦅📚 Words | Language | Etymologyさんのイラストまとめ

JOSTLE, meaning to nudge or bump against, derives from the earlier word ‘joust’. In the 1500s and 1600s, it was used to refer to the collision of riders in a jousting competition.

As a slang term for money, SPONDULIX is believed to come from ‘spondylos’, the Greek name for a type of seashell once used as currency.

In Greek mythology, SYRINX was transformed into reeds to escape the satyr Pan. Because her reeds made a flute-like sound when he breathed on them, her name became both another word for a set of panpipes, and the vocal organ of songbirds. It’s also the origin of the word SYRINGE.

The currency of Guatemala, the QUETZAL, is named after the QUETZAL bird. It in turn takes its name from an Aztec word meaning ‘tail-feather’. QUETZALCOATL was a feathered serpent deity in Aztec mythology—and so the largest known species of pterosaur has been named QUETZALCOATLUS.

FRANCE is named after the Franks, the Germanic people that conquered Roman Gaul in the 5th century. Because that made the Franks the only truly free citizens in the region, their name came to be used to mean ‘free’—which is why you talk FRANKLY when free from constraints.

The American cartoonist Mort Walker called the lines drawn around the sun SOLRADS. The wavy lines used to indicate warm food were named INDOTHERMS, while NEOFLECTS were the small emphasizing lines drawn around something to show that it was brand new, or newly cleaned.

A HEPTATECHNIST is someone well versed in many subjects, or a master of arts. It literally means a ‘seven-artist’—a reference to the traditional Seven Liberal Arts of grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.

Invented in 1913, the OPTOPHONE was a device that used photosensors to translate black text written on a white background into different sound frequencies so that they could be interpreted by the blind.

Named after the biblical prophet Jonah, who initially attempted to flee from a mission given to him by God, in psychology the JONAH COMPLEX is the failure to fulfil your own potential, out of fear of facing (and failing in) new challenges and situations.

DUKE comes from ‘dux’—Latin for ‘leader’.
MARQUIS comes from ‘marche’—French for ‘border’—and was originally the title of a borderland chief.
EARL comes from ‘eorl’—Old English for ‘chief’.
VISCOUNT literally means ‘vice-count’.
BARON comes from ‘baro’, a Frankish word for ‘man’.