weekly posts on literature, languages, and learning
If you like dark and gloomy crime TV with a touch of supernatural and mythological, don’t miss the French series Black Spot on Netflix. When I first started watching Black Spot (orig. Zone blanche), I assumed it would be a typical crime story set in a small place in the middle of nowhere (just the …
Continue reading "Searching for Cernunnos in Villefranche: a review of ‘Black Spot’"
In this post we’ll get to learn a couple of key words connected with the major Christian holiday of Easter, as well as the days preceding it. Some of them have a really interesting origin, so we’ll also take a quick look at their etymology and cultural background.
In an earlier post, I wrote about the etymology of the English words for the days of the week. As we saw there, those words have their origin (for the most part) in the names of some of the main deities of the Germanic pantheon. In this post we’ll look at the names of the …
Continue reading "Modern English names for the months of the year – 100% Latin!"
The names of the days of the week are among the first words English learners get to learn, but probably few ever wonder about their origins and actual meaning. In this post we’ll delve into the etymology of this segment of vocabulary, with a little help from cultural history and mythology. First off, the introduction …
grammaticus 