Thursday 21 April 2011

Etymology and Synonyms


A really interesting video from the Close Reading Cooperative discussing the connotations between similar words of Latin/Norman origin and those of Germanic origin.

Surreptitious or sneaky.

Basically they mean the same but the Latinate word sounds like something a white collar worker/English graduate/bank board member  would do (and get a slap on the wrist) and sneaky, what a ten year old boy, blue collar worker would do (and get locked up)

Think about this when reading your thesaurus.

2 comments:

Aoife.Troxel said...

That was quite interesting. Etymology has always fascinated me, not least for the simple reason that no matter how much you seem to learn about it, there is always still more waiting for you to discover it.

Titus said...

One of my favourite subjects! Ta.