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D'ough! now hunger has me in its pincers again, Bill 
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Man cannot live by bread alone, so et a mology.
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no, Dr bill, not et a -- essa-- as in ess'a bagel.. (ny corruption of the yidish..eat a bagel..) but like colonnel, and coronel, (said kernal, no matter how its spelt) it should be essa' molgy!
PS. did you hear about the poor guy from (pick a county) who finally thought he had a grasp on english.. he finally figured out all the different words with gh, and could pronounce them all!
he was thrilled, untill he walked down Broadway, and saw Variety (movie/theater newspaper) headline -"Tempest pronounced Success!" at which point, he gave up, and never spoke english again!
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I've mentioned this in the past, but one of my favorite etymologies is for a swahili word, kipalafuti. It means roundabout/rotary/traffic circle, depending where your English resides.
It comes from the time when much of East Africa was under British hegemony, and the road signs at rotaries said "Keep Left" (driving on the wrong side, ya know?). Swahili speakers are remarkable at their incorporation of English words, and Swahili words always end in a vowel, so with a little mucking about with the text of the sign, they arrived at kipalufuti.
While we're on the subject, another favorite is the swahili word for a common form of transit in East Africa - the pickup truck with metal poles and crossbars mounted on the back for passengers to hang on to as they stand in the bed of the truck. Such a truck is known as a "matatu," the Swahili for "three" - based on the idea that, whatever I might think in considering whether to board, there's always room for three more people.
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And, since the prefix ki- indicates language, kipalafuti would be the language spoken by the wapalafuti. A single individual would be mpalafuti. So, eventually wapalafuti would be motor vehicle drivers and an individual driver would be mpalafuti.
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wapalafuti would be motor vehicle drivers and an individual driver would be mpalafuti.Would the poor souls only drive in circles? p.s. - looking up at my post on matatu - Swahili for "three" is tatu, so matatu is "three more" - kind of. For them what's interested, there's a cool Swahili-English dictionary at http://www.yale.edu/swahili/.
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Vocabulary note: forum, "the marketplace" or "the center of public life in a city or town" has come to mean any
public meeting place or medium for open discussion. The root of forum is FOR- meaning "door"; other words
from this root are: forest, foreign, foreclose, forfeit, and hors d'oeuvre (outside the chef's work). From forum
comes forensic, "pertaining to the lawcourts." For- is cognate to English door.
Vocabulary note: focus means "hearth" in Latin, as in the expression pro aris et focis, "for altars and hearths."
The English words focus and focal take their meaning from the centrality of the fireplace in the home. In the
Romance languages (the languages derived from the language of the Romans), the fire itself is still burning: feu
(French), fuego (Spanish), fuoco (Italian). Thus the English words curfew, fuel, foyer come from Latin through
French.
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floccinaucinihilipilification
"The act of making something worthless" as in "I admired him for nothing so much as his floccinaucinihilipilification of
money."
Floccus "a tuft of wool" > floccose ("full of or containing tufts of wool") and flocculus ("a small tuft of wool") >
flocculent ("resembling a tuft of wool") and flocculate ("to gather into tufts of wool").
Nauci is related to nugae "trifles, trivial things" > nugacious, nugatory, nugilogue (trivial talk, small talk),
nugigerulous ("carrying toys"), but not nougat which comes from nux, nuc- "nut".
Nihil "nothing" > nil, null, nihilism, nihilist, nihility, annihilate.
Pilus "hair" > piliferous ("hirsute"), depilatory, plush, caterpillar ("hairy cat"), pileus ("cap") and by a connection
that remains obscure, possibly pillage.
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Pilus = "hair" [examples follow]
also "pile", in the sense of the raised pile of a carpet.
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I love it -- more bread etymology!
Bethlehem:
In Hebrew, beit = house; lechem = bread
Arabic may well be similar.
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