Thom writes:Each week, I post three words. You write something using the words.
Then come back and post a link to the contribution with Mr. Linky (but please, link to the exact post, not your blog, by clicking on the exact post title and paste it to Mr. Linky below). As always, there's no hard-and-fast rule that you have to post on Wednesday.
To link up with this week's Three Word Wednesday *click here*
This week's words:
Crumble; Drawn; Uneasy
Etymological note:
"Drawn" is one of our cool old words as a verb form source. This word takes its place as a past tense of "draw" and the placement of "-n" as a suffix to change tense is definitely not the standard way to change tense these days. I draw. I have drawn. He drew. Consider that this also happens to "grow", among other words. This whole sequence is a survival from much earlier times. Linguists consider words such as drawn to be far too important to our language so we have not changed them along with our so-called standard rules, which have changed with the times. Thus English speakers preserve the old forms coming as they do from English's Germanic and Norse roots and call these verb forms "irregular".
Origin:
before 900; Middle English drawen, Old English dragan; cognate with Old Norse draga to draw, German tragen to carry.
Also, "draw, drawn, drew" is old enough to have gained phrasing and idioms such as
draw ahead, draw away, draw down, draw in, draw off. I can have "drawn myself up" also and native English speakers will usually understand what I mean.
Sorry. I just find this stuff fascinating.
The Idiomatic Life
The way the cookie
will crumble means something cool
to stumblebum me.
Maybe I need to
grow up as you have grown up
or to draw me up
as they have drawn up.
Oh, it gets me uneasy
I admit, I do.
As they say, I need
to man up - what a concept.
Don't you love this shit?
I sure know I do.
August 8, 2012 5:52 AM
LOL I love old saying like that the way the cookie crumbles,
ReplyDeleteMy book that I will be publishing soon is called A Penny Saved A Murder Earned a play on a penny saved a penny earned from Benjamin Franklin.
you seem to have a such love affair with the English language, weighing every word....and, yes, I 'love this shit'
ReplyDeleteExcellent; I learned something...
ReplyDeleteThis whole business is definitely a minority enjoyment. I really don't know why I love knowing the historical structures of English, and how there was a "great vowel shift" a few hundred years back and all that stuff. It is something other than having a love for languages per se. I don't know any others and hate the massive memorizing involved. I have a smattering of Spanish and even less of Russian and familiarity with sacred Sanskrit and perhaps a bit more of Latin.
ReplyDeleteThe history of Indo-European feels to me like critical information somehow. I am a critter of the minority at an extreme level.
The French got it all wrong when they set up a committee to ensure the purity of the french language. English in it's many forms and variations is a delight as we know only too well in Australia with our exclusive "Strine" not too dissimlar from "Cockney" slang. No, I don't think it is a minority enjoyment.
ReplyDelete