Sunday, November 30, 2008

Hodgepodge

At the Telegraph, Henry Hitchings offers an A to Z of word surprises. A good stretch:
N is for…

Namby-pamby. Nickname of the 18th-century poet Ambrose Phillips, coined by the satirist Henry Careybecause of his sentimental verses

O is for…

Onslaught, from the Dutch aanslag - related to a word in Old High German for a shower.

P is for…

Penguin, a compound of two Welsh words, pen and gwyn, which mean ''head" and ''white" - even though penguins have black heads. It is likely that 'penguin' was at one time the name of similar, now extinct bird which had a white patch near its bill.

Q is for…

Quack can be traced to the Dutch kwaksalver, literally someone who hawked ointments.

3 comments:

  1. hello,
    well this has nothing to do with wht you were talking about but when, if indeed there will be, is the fallow up book for The Explosionist coming out. I literally finished it 10 mins ago

    ReplyDelete
  2. I am very glad you liked it! I am writing the follow-up now, and I think the earliest it could be out would be next winter sometime, but maybe more like summer 2010 - and I am still not sure whether this one is going to be the whole rest of the story, or whether it is only the middle volume of a trilogy!

    ReplyDelete
  3. well, whenever it get out i will be excited for it. I am writting a paper on your book for school and I would be delighted if you told me more about Sophie, like if you based her off of anyone you know.
    by the way i dont mean to be anonymous i just dont have a google/blogger thing

    ReplyDelete