English Language Words We Got From The Weather

People who constantly want to talk about the weather are boring, and their weather-based chats bring the rain down upon our heads when we get stuck talking to those drips.

Listen beautiful relax classics on our Youtube channel.

But if these weather wizards were actually in the know they’d have something to talk about besides daily highs and lows- like how many words in the English language were originally used to describe weather conditions.

This fun video from Mental Floss features linguist Arika Okrent revealing the weather-based origin of English words like lavish, nuance, debacle, congeal and detonate while illustrator Sean O’Neill draws up a visual example:

The root of detonate is the Latin tonare, or thunder. De-tonare is a thundering down. By detonating something you can create your own thunder. Astonish also goes back to tonare. To be astonished is literally to be thunderstruck. Pretty astonishing, huh?

(YouTube Link)

-Via Laughing Squid

Source: neatorama

Rating English Language Words We Got From The Weather is 5.0 / 5 Votes: 4
Please wait...
Loading...