Take Our Word For It Issue 202
Melanie and Mike
http://www.takeourword.com
For Mac users who have trouble with our regular homepage:
http://www.takeourword.com/indexmac.html
**Greetings**
Since January, our on-time publishing average has been pretty good, we
must say! (We published Issue 202 last night but, due to some lost data
that took a while to recover, we were too spent to write this
newsletter until now.)
**This Week's Issue**
NOTE: The links in this newsletter are good until the next issue is
published.
In Spotlight we visit the Danish
http://www.takeourword.com/current/page1.html
In Words to the Wise we bring you the following words:
the @ sign
http://www.takeourword.com/current/page2.html#@
sir/sire
http://www.takeourword.com/current/page2.html#sir
sign (singular form only)
http://www.takeourword.com/current/page2.html#sign
cob (to steal)
http://www.takeourword.com/current/page2.html#cob
In Curmudgeons' Corner Guestmudgeon Lynn Nordhagen speaks of pour/pore
http://www.takeourword.com/current/page3.html
In Sez You... we hear about the MENSA invitational; mercaptan;
verbifying nouns; purposefully weird spellings; some very bad (read:
good) puns; and "nucular"
http://www.takeourword.com/current/page4.html
In Laughing Stock we bring you chirldens
http://www.takeourword.com/current/page5.html
**Newsletter-Only Etymology (NOE)**
Here's your carrot for subscribing to this companion newsletter to the
TOWFI webzine: a NOE.
>From Elly:
My English Language A-Level class were asked about the etymology of
zit, and we thought that it could come from Yiddish or German, although
we are not sure. Your site has proved most interesting and useful when
trying to find out the etymology of certain words, so thank you! I
hope that our contribution on the zit hunt could lead you on to some
more discoveries.
Initially, we simply research a word, not really taking into
consideration any ideas we may already have about its origins. It was
very interesting to us that, on researching zit this time around, one
of the only suggested etymologies we came across which was not simply
"unknown" suggested a Yiddish origin for zit. A Victor Bers (posting
to a Usenet group about Yiddish) says that German zitze means "teat"
and wonders if there may be a derived Yiddish "zit" that could have
come to mean "pimple." He doesn't go so far as to say that some
pimples look like little breasts, but we could see that analogy.
However, we have not been able to find any reference to the existence
of a Yiddish word "zit" with that meaning. So, for now, English zit
continues to be a mystery (we first discussed this word in Issue 162
(http://www.takeourword.com/TOW162/page2.html)).
**Laughing Stock**
Please send us material for Laughing Stock. This week's winner,
Stacey, will receive a $10 gift certificate to Amazon.com. Thanks,
Stacey! (We will be sending out the Amazon.com gift certificates to all
2006 winners in the next week.)
**Curmudgeons' Corner**
Is everyone feeling complacent? Surely there's something you want to
complain about! Let us know about it.
**Blog**
The TOWFI blog at http://www.takeourword.com/blog1 is still alive. We
try to post between issues to keep everyone awake. You can post, also,
and you do not have to sign up to do so. You do have to post in
response to an existing post by us, but there are no rules about
staying on topic, etc. Speak (write) up!
**T-shirt Store**
Don't forget to help us stamp out netymology by purchasing a TOWFI
t-shirt or other goody. Black t-shirts have been requested by some
faithful readers, and we are working on those. Stay tuned.
**Book Store**
The book store is still located at
http://www.takeourword.com/bookStore.html . We have a book review to
finish up -- the problem is finding the book from among boxes and boxes
and boxes of books (we moved not too long ago).
Until next time,
Take Our Word For It!
Melanie and Mike
http://www.takeourword.com
http://www.takeourword.com/indexmac.html
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