I’ll never forget the first Christmas after I’d taken a French class. A manger, as far as I’d known, was a decorative place where hay gets stored, roughly the size of a baby carriage most of the time, about knee high.
Then I recognized that word: manger, to eat. It dawned in me that a manger was a trough where an animal eats. They’re often longer and presumably not as snug and inviting as the fake ones I’d seen.
Around this time I was a waiter who was learning how foie gras gets made – and yes, I do think there is a place in hell for those who make it and eat it. I’d seen gras before, something about Fat Tuesday.
Another time I was shopping with an immigrant who needed to pay for something small and produced coins from his pocket. Instead paying with them, he handed them to me, who was quicker with these five- and twenty five-cent pieces, and the ten-cent coin that was mystifyingly the smallest of all.
I tried explaining that it wasn’t that hard. The quarter was a quarter of a dollar. The little dime was…could the d-i in dime be the same d-i -in diez, for ten cents?
Then there was the time I noticed that the White Mountains were in New Hampshire but the Green Mountains in a place called Ver-Mont.
Discovering new, esoteric words and congratulating oneself for being able to place them via their cognates is an elite kind of pleasure, like the day you hear about an old relative who has tachycardia and you know what it means because you know what a tachometer does.
The more humbling pleasure is realizing you have been using a word for a long time without appreciating its simplest meaning. There are cognates hidden in plain sight, words we have a deeper connection to than we realize. We use them every day, making witty cross-cultural puns without meaning to.
I was reminded of another this week when I watched an episode of an excellent online series called Woodlanders – more on which another time. A woman in Greece harvests acorns, grinds the nuts themselves into flour, and takes the acorn caps and sells them to a tannery in Germany. Can you guess what the active ingredient the tannery is after? Tannic acid.
My neighbors as a kid in New Jersey were a working class family who called their living room their “poller,” or parlor, a word I prefer to “living room,” which is so antiseptic. It implies a room where you’d play parlor games, or maybe just talk, parl.
I could go on, but I must get back to work. Been too busy to blog. I promise I’ll write more by the full moon, which comes, incidentally, once a month.
More Has To Happen 