One of my favorite things about history is how little bits of it are preserved through traditions and mythology and we don’t even notice it. Like how we still say “’Tis the season” at Christmastime. Who says ‘tis anymore? No one, it’s dead except in this tiny phrase. I had a friend once tell me that she noticed the only group of people who could consistently identify a spinning wheel were girls between the ages of 4 and 7. Why? Sleeping Beauty. There are little linguistic quirks that have been around for centuries, bits of slang we use that people 400 years ago would recognize, but unless you showed someone a 400 year old dictionary, they’d never believe it. Whispers of the past are always there.
Words preserved through idioms are actually called Fossil Words! Here’s a Wikipedia article listing a bunch of examples.
I propose we Jurassic Park these suckers.
precisely! There’s far more of them than you’d realize. A pothole is from when potters used to harvest clay from the side of the road. Pot. Hole.
Your phone goes boinkey bleep but we still call it ringing, from when phones had actual bells on the outside of actual boxes.
Have you ever had to explain to a Gen Z why we “roll down” a car’s window?
Lowercase and uppercase are from typesetting, storing lead letters into boxes or cases for print.
The daily grind is from when a day’s use of grain was ground for bread.
“Fire!” as the command to shoot, in English, only picked up with gunpowder, as you’d light or fire the guns. To fire is to set fire to something. Prior to that, the command for a bunch of archers isn’t and has never been Fire, it’s Loose. Notice this little anachronism in most medievaloid films.
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