We've Got The County Covered
We've Got The County Covered
We don’t run out of these terms of which we might think there are only a few, but they crop up all the time.
A few months ago, on my way to farthingale, I came upon fascet.
It’s pronounced the same as facet yet is nothing like it. With the c, it means a tool for carrying glass bottles to the annealing furnace, a process in glass making.
Without the c, it is a facet, a plane (flat) surface cut in a diamond to make it sparkle.
Gambol and gamble look so much alike that it is a surprise to see the dictionary distinguish them from one other.
The meaning of gamble is probably from Middle English, meaning to amuse oneself.
Frisk, play, spring about is gambol. The o is short, ah. But has anyone ever heard it pronounced so precisely? Has anyone ever heard it pronounced at all? It’s related to the slang term gam, leg.
Bay has many meanings—a color for horses, body of water, barking of dogs, for a start, none very obscure.
Bey is a Turkish term which turns up in news dispatches from the Middle East.
Slow we know well, but what is a sloe?
“Sloe-eyed beauty” is a novelist’s cliché and a sloe is a fruit of the blackthorn tree, or the tree itself.
Her eyes will be bluish or purplish-black, anyway dark but not in the brown range.
We don’t confuse steal with steel, but we might confuse still with the trademark, Stihl. They sound the same, but how would one know?
Tuff is a kind of rock, maybe volcanic, maybe not, depending on which term the geologist prefers.
Tough is defined first as having the quality of flexibility without brittleness. Variations and refinements of this definition follow, all of them related meanings, all interesting.
That’s one thing I love about a good dictionary, precise definitions all somewhat different from each other, but wasting no words and making clear that the meanings are not there to confuse us but to provide us with just the right word in its spot.
Wayne used to be a popular name for men and boys, perhaps partly in honor of General Anthony Wayne who was an officer under Washington during the Revolutionary War.
Wain is an old English word for wagon or cart, nowadays seen mostly in historical novels as haywain.
The tiny little word wane means to be diminished, to decrease. It’s small but mighty, or at least very old—it goes back to Sanskrit!
The moon waxes and wanes every month, wax in this sense meaning increase, from Greek.
Another day, we will find more such interesting pairs or triplets of English words.
