#434 - Discover the ORIGIN of Words in English — Learn Vocabulary More Easily
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Awww yeah! Real lifers, global citizens, this is Izzy from RealLife English where it is our mission to guide you beyond the classroom to speak English confidently and naturally, to connect with the world, and to actually use your English as a doorway to the life of your dreams.

So if you watch today's lesson until the end, you'll discover how to make English easier to learn and remember by exploring the origin of words, where they come from, and why they are the way they are. And we're going to aim to turn frustration into curiosity and help you embrace English's quirks instead of fighting them. So I have here in the studio with me today Xenia.

who is actually a huge fan of etymology. Etymology is exactly the science, the studies of the origin of words. So, thanks, Senia.

Hi, Easy. It's so great to be back. It's been a while, right? Guys, you might hear that I sound a little bit differently today. It's just because I have a stuffy nose. I'm a little bit under the weather today. Under the weather? Under the weather sounds like there's some context there. There's some culture that you need to understand in order to really get that expression. What is, would you know the origin of that particular expression? Okay, Easy. Thanks for asking. Now I know it perfectly.

as well together with all our audience because actually we had to ask Ethan to help us explain what it actually means where the term comes from and it comes from maritime which is sailing guys you can picture yourself sailors at sea being exposed to the weather and feeling seasick yes when they're under the weather when there is a storm or something going on so they would go below the deck and

try to recover. So when they're under the weather, they feel sick, but then they hide themselves below the deck to recover. Deck is a good word too. It's like these floors on a ship, right? But the deck would be the floor that's actually being exposed to the weather. But Ethan, let me ask you as well. You used in the intro, you used a nice word quirk. Since we started explaining vocabulary, could you also explain the word quirk?

All right, yeah. I said that today we're going to explore English's quirks. Instead of like fighting them, we're going to be, you know, excited about them. So a quirk is an unusual characteristic, you know, something that makes you very different from most people. That's a quirk of yours. All right. So Xenia, let's now dive into the world of etymology. But first, what's the deal with first? The word first. Have you ever thought about that? And also the word second?

Like, they're very different from third, fourth, fifth, sixth, because they follow the names of the numbers. It's like five, six, seven, eight, six, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth. But first and second, they do not. Yeah, I know. You know, another thing that I know is that because English is in the family of...

in the european languages i know that they share the numbers in common so we can trace back all the common roots but i've i don't remember if i've ever checked this thing first second third could you explain it to me please yeah i actually have a clip that i found yesterday when i was just uh you know researching about this topic and let's check it out i think it's just super interesting if you are in position three you're in third place position five

Position 197? 197. Pretty simple. So why do positions 1 and 2 give us first and second? Shouldn't they be 1th and 2th?

Well, maybe, but English loves collateral adjectives. Adjectives derived from different roots than the nouns they describe. There are plenty of derived adjectives, don't get me wrong. A bunch of clouds make the day cloudy. Friends are friendly. Poets are poetic. Things with a lot of smell to them are smelly. But the moon is not moonly. The moon is lunar.

That's interesting.

As the whole etymology is. I know that's really like a mysterious thing. You know why people actually love etymology? I guess it's because we tend to love all those things

puzzles, mysteries, take Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie's novels, right? We're kind of addicted to solving puzzles. And etymology is just like a huge puzzle to solve where everything comes from, how you get this or that word. But actually, after like watching this video, there is one more puzzle left for me. I didn't quite get about the first and second. Are those words coming from a different language or something? Could you just

briefly sum up it for me. Yeah, let me just clarify that because it was in the very beginning of the clip and it was just shown on screen. So if you guys are not watching this lesson on the RealLife app, by the way, if you're just listening, you should know that there are some things that were shown on screen that you can only see if you're on an app. So click the link in the description to download and start watching this lesson from there. First comes from the order. You have two parts there in that word. Fur, which is...

from Proto Indo-European, this original language in Europe that means forward. It's the thing that goes forward.

You know, and the second part like "st" comes from the superlative. So it's the most forward number one or first. And second comes from "secundo" which is following. It follows number one, two follows one. So that's what second is. Even there is even that verb, right? I second you and I follow you, right? Oh, there are so many other words we would love to share the history behind them today.

Yeah, I can think of some collateral adjectives, by the way. He mentioned that collateral adjectives are this when you have a noun that uses a root from a certain language and then the adjective of that word uses a different root. So there's the case of moon and lunar, as he said, but there's also sun and solar. Solar, yeah. Yeah, or stars and stellar.

How about vivid? Do you know where that comes from? The word vivid? Vivid. Again, it might be a folk etymology. I would connect it to vision. You know, it's funny. Because of... As a non-native, myself and you, you may know some words where they come from that I don't and vice versa. In Portuguese, the word life...

In Portuguese it's vida. And from Latin it's like vivere, which is to live. So I know that vivid means like full of life.

And intensive, you know. There's even the word revive, which is more literal in this case. That's a very great point that you're bringing here, Izzy. It's just because of those connections between your mother tongue and English or the language you're learning. Because it becomes like a fun quest when you start learning new words. Not only can you come across the similarities. Yeah, English word might be the same word.

or slightly different as in your native language, just because they either were a borrowed word or they share the common root. But you can also trace back in history if you really take an effort, look up the etymology, you can trace back in history to this word, where it came from. So it's

Just imagine when you learn etymology or learn a new language, it's not only about words, it's about our common history. All the transactions, interactions we had, all this common history we share. Like, for example, right now I'm reading this fun book, Languages are Good for Us. And I'm on the chapter right now where the author, Sophie Gardach, she's explaining this

these travels, the words took from one language into another together with traders, right? Right now she's into Middle East and explaining how the names of spices were adopted by different languages. Wow, so exciting. Can you give me one example like in English of a spice? What is a spice, by the way?

spice is that thing that makes your food taste better. Like, yeah, you spice it up. Such as? Like a cinnamon or salt even. Like the most widespread spice is salt and pepper. Right? But in particular, she was talking about cumin.

which is a spice that, funny enough, didn't change its name in so many languages. And it even found itself in Mexico. But it goes back into some Acadian, some super ancient language that existed even before the first written language, which is Sumerian. In Portuguese, that's cominho, cumin. You see it, same root. Yeah. Yeah.

And one expression that I came across, a word that was just fascinating to me, the actual origin of it was the word oxymoron. I gave this word in another lesson months ago and we explained it.

But I think now we get to see the actual meaning of it in the origin of it. Do you know, first of all, do you know what that is, an oxymoron? Yeah, this is something that is when you combine two things which are opposites, like, I don't know, loud noise or something like, right? Not loud noise, it's like loud silence. Loud silence? Right, yeah, exactly, loud silence. Sounds quite poetic, right? It's used a lot in poetry, like I'd say that it was...

It was so silent that it's like a loud silent you could say. But some words are more applicable, like old news. Yeah, that's a nice example. Or virtual reality. That's a thing. But did you know that the word oxymoron is an oxymoron? Oh, no, really? Yeah. So the word oxy means sharp.

In the word moron here, it means blunt. Sharp and blunt. Really? That's ironic. Yeah. So, and just to continue going down his rabbit hole. Do you know this expression? Yeah. Yeah.

please explain it better the way I understand it is just like you know every there are like so many details and like you go deeper and deeper there are so many layers to something when something is so complex that there are too many layers and you go into this rabbit hole just like going on Wikipedia and just opening one article and then you find another link and open another one and then have 10 tabs open so just going down this rabbit hole of the word oxymoron moron

is a word that exists in English. It's actually used more as slang. But the word sharp, which oxy means sharp. Sharp is intelligent, right? It's synonymous to intelligent. So the opposite of sharp would be blunt. So in some sense, like a moral person is a blunt person since they're not very sharp. But anyway, the word oxymoron is an oxymoron. It has two opposites in it.

So see, once you learn all this meaning, all these meanings behind these words, it's just easier to remember them and they add more richness and more quality to

Your speech, you become, I think, more fluent because of that. You know, your English is not so superficial. You know, is it what I thought about right now? Because actually, we don't talk a lot about etymology here in our podcast, but I'm super passionate about it. I would love to share more if our audience is interested. So guys, if you are interested in having a segment or from time to time to come back to this topic, please write us.

in the comments that you would love to hear more of this in our future episodes. I'd love it. Yeah. And, you know, I'm a vegetarian myself since I was born, but I do find interesting the words that exist in English to refer to the animal.

And the meat. And the meat, yeah. Yeah, I think that's a classic example why in English we have an English and a French counterpart if you go back in history, right? But I'm sorry, I interrupted you. Please go on. I was going to ask you, do you know what's the word for cow meat? Like cow's meat? Yeah, it's beef. The same happens with sheep, right? Sheep and mutton.

But how about pig? It's pork, right? And finally, last one, deer. Oh, it was a more difficult one. Let me try and remember it. It's a longer one. Venison? Venison. Venison. I learned this from playing Minecraft.

Really? It's like 15 years ago. Again, it shows how cool it is to play video games and learn English. Yeah, to live your English, right? And I did, I played it in English. So you get a lot from media, whatever kind of media you're a fan of. But do you know how it happened to be this way? To have a name of an animal, one thing, and then the meat is a totally different word.

I don't know the reason. Why is that?

the French language became the official language of the court, of the right of the court, and commoners, common folk, they would continue using Old English. So, for example, the word pig, they would, commoners, farmers, common people would actually, you know, breed pigs for the royals to eat pork then. So when it becomes a meal,

It changes the word for the French equivalent. And when it's an animal, it's still old English name. But this is interesting because isn't the root of modern English simply...

Old English, would you say? Because I know you know a lot about the history there. But tell me. You're opening Pandora's box here. Like it's a totally different episode. I'm not sure I'm well prepared to talk about it. It's just like I really love this thing. But I'm terrible with dates and names and everything. But, you know...

So English as we know it today is just like a super complex combination of so many languages just because of its history. So there's French, there's Latin, there's all those... Basically English belongs to Germanic languages. And if we imagine a language as a tree, its roots go down like many, many, many centuries, thousands of years, right?

uh deep so it's a it's a combination uh of germanic languages of french latin and some other even greek so english is really this mashup of germanic languages like latin norse languages a mashup is this is when you have a mix right of things you have the word uh the expression meshed potatoes it's like when you you mesh it so it's like a

Mixed and all together. I believe I saw the numbers and it's something crazy. It's like around 30% of English is Latin or 15% is Latin and 30% is French because there are a lot of French words. Yeah, I think it's something around like that. But again, guys, if you check out the statistics, it looks crazy. Are there even English words in the English language? Yeah.

All right, Christina, so I want to challenge you again to guess the word. If I give you, like I was giving you different animals, like names of animals, like cow, pig, and then you were telling me what's the name of the meat for that animal. But what if I give you some words that they have like an adjective that's from a different root, just like lunar instead of moonly, right? Let's try. I love game. That's great. Yeah.

Let's see. Let's start with an easier one. How about the word dog? Canine or something like that. Yeah, canine. Canine. Oh, I was wrong with the pronunciation, right? Canine. I never used that, but I heard it from somewhere. You've read it, right? It comes from Latin or something.

Right? The name of the dog. In some of the movies, you might have seen this K9, like the letter K at 9. And it basically is...

It refers to a dog, like a police dog, right? The police that works with the dogs. Because it's the same pronunciation, canine. Canine, wow, Tracy. How about cat? Do you know the adjective for cat? Like, let's say there's a...

Cat's disease, a specific disease. What would the adjective be for that? Oh my God. I love cats more than dogs and I don't know the word. No. It's also a noun. Like when we talk about the big cats, like lions and... Oh, okay. That I can. You know that? I can. Give me time. Give me time. The big cats. I'm sure I knew it. It doesn't come to me now. Fifi. Fifi.

Feline. Feline. But how about the word brother? Like, do you mean brethren? Oh, fraternal. You're referencing the fraternal. Okay. Exactly. You can, to make this easier, you can think like when I say brother, you can think like what's a...

If there's a quality that's related to being brother, you could say there's brotherly, right? But fraternal is the word that people use more often. You're saying brother and all I can hear now in my head is, I always wanted a brother. I always wanted a brother. That's the song that Mira is singing every day now because we've just watched Mufasa, Lion King. I always wanted a brother. I always wanted a brother. How about child? If somebody's acting like a child,

What is their behavior called? Very... Aha, let me say that. Infantile, right? Infantile, yes. How about eye? Like my eyes. What is the... I go to a doctor, what is the kind of... Oh, like... Terminology, what is it? Like ocular. Ocular, yes.

It's because I know the name of the doctor, the oculus. Just the other day, I took Mira to check her eyesight. It's dropped. So we went to the ophthalmologist. But a simpler name to it is the oculus, the eye doctor. I think parts of the body is full of that too, for whatever reason. Maybe there's a reason for that, just like food. Because of medicine, because of Latin comes from... I believe Latin once was a language for medicine.

The skin, you could say it's dermal, or the teeth, it's dental. About the tooth and the dental, wow, just today I watched the video talking about etymology, you know, to pick up some interesting words there. And basically, that's so funny, but they share the common root, they just came into English at different times. So both tooth and dental, they come from the same root, from the same word.

That's crazy again. Really interesting little segment here playing this game and our lessons are usually like this, right? Like they're divided like in different parts and for all of you guys watching and listening to us on YouTube or streaming platforms, you should know that you can actually consume our lessons and learn with them part by part divided in chapters and micro lessons on our app, on the real life app. It's so much more convenient because if you have just like 10 minutes, you know, if you're

Not exactly learning if you're outside, if you're in line at the bank or supermarket, you can just pull up your phone and start learning on the spot right there.

And I'm going to link the link in the description so you can try that right now. And the link will take you straight to this lesson over there so you can continue watching it from there too. It gives you so many resources, flashcards for you to learn as well. You can really internalize all these words that we're using today, these advanced expressions. So link in the description and we'll see you there. Alright, now I have a slightly different game that I'd like to play with you to challenge you here with.

And it's important to note, to notice that English has many synonyms. Like one word may have dozens of synonyms. And I can give you one example. You could say ask, but you could also say inquire or interrogate.

they have different slightly different connotation right meaning but they could mean the same thing and have different origins uh ask is from germanic languages inquires like more from french and interrogate more from pure latin um so i would ask you for synonyms if i tell you for example let's say if i give you the word fast what words come to mind you need to you don't need to think about

like the origin of the words you're thinking about, just give me some synonyms. So it might be quick or rapid. How about nimble? Have you heard that before? Nimble.

I've definitely heard this word. What's the meaning of that? Nimble. It's fast, but it's more unique in its application. Oh, we're still on the fast. I'm fast enough to move to another word, right? To move forward. Nimble. Oh, no, I wouldn't connect it with the fast. You see? Nimble. Interesting. Yeah, so nimble. Maybe you could collocate that with fingers like a pianist.

Has nimble fingers. Or gymnast has nimble movements. This is Olympic. Yeah. It's interesting that there are certain words that they can't be direct synonyms, but they are collocated with certain words that, for example, it's so great to use them in this collocation, right? Like nimble fingers. So you kind of have this connotation of something quick and light. Like movements. Very easy. Yeah.

Yeah, see this is so nice, nimble. It's different from fast, right? If you've seen this word being used in these contexts, suddenly it means more than simply fast. It's light, as you said, right? It involves like being accurate, maybe even like artistically accurate. It's beautiful to see, to watch it maybe, right? Nimble movement in this sense.

And words, they really carry so much more meaning than like a simple definition. And that's why it's important to really live the language and see how they're applied to really

witness real-life English in front of you so you get all this meaning. You know what we also didn't share actually about etymology? It's like it's the science of how the language was changing as well and still it has been changing since the very beginning and until now because every year you know there are new words appear but not only that

One of the fun sides of that is that words can also change their meanings. For example, take the word nice. Initially, originally, it meant something bad. It meant some unintelligent person or something like that. It came way back in history. And now it means something good. Yeah, nice person, friendly person.

So words also change over time. That's also another fascinating side of etymology. That's so nice because even with words that we're seeing today, we may think that they will be here forever, but they could vanish. They could go away. And I do have some examples here that I set aside that I wanted you to explain why some of these expressions could be going away. So for example, if I say, hang up the phone.

So we still do that. We still say that, but it doesn't have its literal meaning anymore. So maybe because new kids don't really have that association, they won't. But why did we used to say hang up the phone? And what does that mean? Because basically of those old times phones that you had this receiver, how would you call that? Yeah. And so you could hang it up and hang up just to...

And because we're using smartphones, they just click the button. But with that said, there are some awards which surprisingly reappear from older times. For example, if you think about Black Plague, terrible epidemics that swept across Europe, right?

And then when we had this coronavirus, we had terrible thing of lockdown and there was quarantine. And because you're a native speaker of Portuguese, maybe quarantine says you something. Where can it come from? Yeah. So the word 40 is 40 in Portuguese. Exactly. And it comes from those words.

Terrible years of the Black Plague, when the sailors, when coming from abroad, they had to quarantine for 40 days. It was just a quarantine meant basically 40 days of being isolated, not to spread the disease if they could have it coming from different countries.

And we use this word again during the coronavirus pandemic. That's true. Quarantine. Yeah, I remember people didn't know what that meant. They're like, okay, let me look that up. In Portuguese, I think it's easier to guess it, right? Yeah, but some phrases that I was thinking here as well, let me continue challenging you. How about rewind a movie? Is that something that we can still...

I don't know, maybe you would still like call those buttons, but now you actually see them on the screen, rewind buttons. But back in the day, those were actual buttons on this video recorder, video player, right? So that you would rewind it. The cassettes. What is that? To rewind something? What's the meaning of that? Like literally? Literally.

It's like wind, because it's similar, like the spelling of a wind is like a breeze, but it's a different pronunciation, right? And different meaning. Exactly. This is something related to turning back this tape. So cassettes had tapes. So you had to come back to the very beginning. You had to rewind it. So like a wire, imagine, like, I don't know how to call that, but you can wind it. Like you would, yeah?

shape it in a ball or something. A more common word or form for that verb is you'd hear like a wound up, right? Like a mummy is wound up. Yeah, exactly. So this is about rapping, right? Rapping, yeah. There you go. How about to tune in to a show?

That's interesting. It's related to technology, right? Because technology advances and some words are left behind, but we can continue using them, but for how long? Maybe they would go away, right? At least the application of these. Yeah, but people would use it even without realizing the origin of it. Like, tune in. Right now, I don't have a relation to what it actually meant. Like,

Literally, I would just tune in, use it like, oh, I will join and start listening to it or start watching it. But what was it in relation with? So tune, I don't know if you've heard the expression, the Caucasian fine tuning, which is adjusting the frequencies. Yeah. So you can really get more pristine, more clear sound from the radio or simply tuning on the radio. That's exactly what that means. You tune.

it's finding the adjusting the frequencies fine tuning is something that i hear more these days as a collocation which is just removing those small inconsistencies or errors but people these days you just click play right to start listening or watching we don't need to adjust any frequencies to

to start listening or watching anything. So it was related to frequencies, like on the radio. Yeah, because if you wanted to listen to a show, you'd have to first tune in to be on the same frequency and find that. We still do that, right? But now you just press a button and it automatically finds the frequencies, but you can actually see the frequencies. They tell you that. And one last one, still related to technology. Have you heard the collocation and the expression to sound like a broken record?

Yeah, it means like when you have an actual record playing and when it's broken, it just like repeats itself like over and over again.

That part of a record, like a playing record. What is a record? I don't know how to explain that. But basically, that's that round thing with the music recorded on it. Yeah, like a vinyl. LP vinyl. Vinyl. If you're scratched, exactly that. Like they're broken, so they don't play and they keep repeating exactly what you said. But young people still say this.

I sound like a broken record, but maybe some of these people, especially like the off-light generation, they don't even know what that means a lot of times. These words can go away, right? Especially the ones that are more like record could go away, at least in this sense, or tune in. We don't think that it could, but it can and it has happened and it happens every year.

Every decade, every century, we see this renewal of words. Again, I would be skeptical. You never know when the word can reappear, but I know where you're getting. I mean, because we don't use those things anymore. Language is a life organism almost, so it's always evolving, developing, adding new words, forgetting older words, then bringing them back.

And who knows, maybe in hundreds of years from now, English won't sound anything close to what we know it today, right? Yeah. Nowhere near that. It's very likely that it won't, actually, based on the past. But anyway, Xenia, this was such a nice lesson to do with you. I know you are a fan of etymology, etymology as I was saying, and etymology.

uh you actually inspired me to get more into this you know i learned so much by preparing and with you here today so thank you and i also want to thank you guys watching and listening to us if you are on youtube just know that you can support us by hitting the subscribe button and the bell down below and also giving this video a like because that helps youtube know that this is valuable this video this lesson is valuable for you and it can also be available for other learners

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You can start your vocabulary practice right away now that you have completed this lesson. So thank you so much. And as we always say on this podcast, no matter what divides us, that which unites us is far greater. One, two, three.