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| WordLover
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| 930835. Wed Aug 08, 2012 1:34 am |
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| suze wrote: | | After all, a surname applied to someone who really was a nun would struggle to propagate. |
Quite, but a surname meaning "nun" might have been applied to people who weren't actually nuns. Nunn "was likely originally a nickname for a pious person or an occupational name for someone who worked at a convent" [1] or "a pious and demure man" [2].
[1] http://www.houseofnames.com/nunn-family-crest , and curses on the web site designer, who buggered Ctrl-C, forcing me to type what I wanted to copy from the web page
[2] http://www.ancestry.co.uk/name-origin?surname=nunn |
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| Efros
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| Awitt
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| 930874. Wed Aug 08, 2012 6:58 am |
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Tonight on the ABC's Randling show I learnt that Eritrea has 2 ways to describe a home - the place where one currently resides, and the previous home.
[url]http://www.abc.net.au/tv/randling/[url] |
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| NinOfEden
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| 930927. Wed Aug 08, 2012 10:47 am |
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| suze wrote: | The face rather than specifically the nose, but yes, that's about it. There are references back to the early C19 for bracket mug meaning an ugly face. (As for why one's mug is one's face, it's because drinking mugs often had grotesque faces painted on them. To mug meaning "to assault" has the same origin - originally it meant "to hit in the face".)
Quite why bracket came to mean "ugly" is not known for certain. It may possibly be that an ugly face looked brakkit, an obsolete alternate form of "broken". |
Ohhh, I see.
So a 'broken bracket' is a face that's been cut + bruised? |
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