QI Words and Etymology

Flash · 33125. Mon Nov 21, 2005 5:21 am

I don't think so (ie, I do think that it is officially 'Christ Church' and not 'Christ Church College'). It was something people used to bang on about, anyway.

dharlequin · 33953. Wed Nov 23, 2005 8:43 pm

I think that the official names is The Dean, Chapter and Students of the Cathedral Church of Christ in Oxford of the Foundation of King Henry the Eighth. All other names are probably no more than nicknames.

CCC is another and much older place, of course, so ChCh is the obvious abbreviation, and the refusal to call it "Christ Church College" is probably an insider/outsider demarcation. Nevertheless, here is the college auditor's account, which refers to "Christ Church College".

http://www.akme.btinternet.co.uk/oclchch1.html

Flash · 33986. Thu Nov 24, 2005 4:52 am

This subject is perhaps a backwater of a backwater, even by the standards of this community, but I was at Christ Church and I can assure anyone who cares that it is never, ever, called 'Christ Church College' by anybody there or by the university, Grant Thornton notwithstanding. A glance at Christ Church's own website will bear me out.

The University site lists colleges as follows:

BobTheScientist · 34105. Thu Nov 24, 2005 11:34 am

samivel · 34235. Thu Nov 24, 2005 3:03 pm

And a Pope Alexander ;)

dharlequin · 34945. Sat Nov 26, 2005 12:56 pm

Flash, having spent some twenty years of my life in Oxford, I am aware that the college is always called "Christ Church" or "The Hice".

gerontius grumpus · 35341. Sun Nov 27, 2005 9:01 am

dharlequin · 35473. Sun Nov 27, 2005 3:27 pm

A figure which....by his Greeke and Latine originals....may be called the marching figure....it may aswell be called the clyming figure, for Clymax is as much to say as a ladder.

[George Puttenham?] The Arte of English Poesie (1589)

gerontius grumpus · 35573. Sun Nov 27, 2005 5:28 pm

When I was a small child and I used to hear news reports about the Vietnam war, I used to think it was strangely apt that the Viet Cong were guerillas, having seen the film King Kong.

Jenny · 35583. Sun Nov 27, 2005 5:45 pm

I read that Kong was a Chinese word for 'glorious', but maybe we need brackett to comment on that.

Caradoc · 35653. Sun Nov 27, 2005 9:30 pm

Viet Cong (along with al-Qaeda) is a CIA invention, it sound so much more threatening than the real name of Viet Ming.

see series B of QI for the viet ming bit

Celebaelin · 35658. Sun Nov 27, 2005 9:46 pm

dharlequin · 35665. Sun Nov 27, 2005 11:19 pm

It suits some people to see the hand of Mossad or the CIA behind everything that happens. However, this tendency to see conspiracies everywhere obscures more than it illuminates, and tends to make it difficult to identify real conspiracies.

The CIA did not invent the term "Viet Cong", which is a shortened form of Việt Nam Cộng Sản, the Vietnamese for "Vietnamese Communist".

"Viet Minh" was the shortened name for the earlier anti-colonial force, Việt Nam Ðộc Lập Ðồng Minh Hội, which came to be led by Hồ Chí Minh in the mid-1940s.

As for al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden's own name for his organization was The Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and the Crusaders. Not very catchy. However, in an interview, he said this:

The name "al Qaeda" was established a long time ago by mere chance. The late Abu Ebeida El-Banashiri established the training camps for our mujahedeen against Russia's terrorism. We used to call the training camp al Qaeda[meaning "the base" in English]. And the name stayed.

http://archives.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/asiapcf/south/02/05/binladen.transcript/index.html

Gengulfus · 41798. Mon Dec 26, 2005 1:51 pm

Hullo! Etymology!

Newcomer to the boards here, but I would be terribly sorry to see this particular thread dying out, since I find etymology nearly always QI.

So I have for you today a festive specimen, from the world of the current Jewish holiday Hanukkah:

Latkes is, of course, the plural of latke, a kind of potato pancake now commonly associated with the Jewish religion (more specifically, Ashkenazy Jews) and Hanukkah. The word came into the English language from Yiddish, which, although a Germanic language, borrows heavily from other sources, mainly Hebrew (in its Ashkenazy dialect/pronunciation) and the Slavic languages. Not surprisingly, by the way, Yiddish is spoken almost exclusively by Jewish populations, and the name Yiddish itself means "Jewish" in the language.
In any event, the Yiddish לאטקע (latke) came from the Ukrainian оладка (oldka), which several online dictionaries faithfully translate as pancake, fritter, flapjack, and the like (muffin seems to be in there too for some reason). This is a diminutive of the Old Russian оладья (olad'ya).
Now it gets interesting: this comes from the Greek ελαδια (eladia), plural of ελαδιον (eladion), meaning "a little oily thing", "a little oil", or "a young olive tree". Which proudly paves the way to eladion being a diminutive of elaion, "olive oil", which in turn comes from elaia, the (Ancient) Greek for "olive".

So, centuries later, five languages away, and twice miniaturised, we get our "little tiny things made of (olive) oil" - latkes.

Now to me, that's Quite Interesting!

tetsabb · 41802. Mon Dec 26, 2005 2:49 pm