I enjoy word play; there’s a lot of delight in fiddling with language. I also love the etymology of words; how they came to be and, sometimes, why. Oft-times it’s really obvious. Take ‘football’ for example. Originally, it was a game that was basically people kicking a ball to each other with their feet. The name wasn’t hard to come up with.
Mind you, how football came to be a generic term for any national sport that included a ball, regardless of the amount of time it spent on a foot, is beyond me. How, I ask, can rugby be football? Or American gridiron?
Actually, I do know. Originally, ‘football’ was used to distinguish between games played on horseback and games played on foot. Then there was rugby and soccer which were so named because they were both football. ‘Soccer’ came from the term association football which was shorted to ‘assoc’ which then lost an ‘a’ and gained an ‘er’ to make soccer. Rugby was easy because it started in posh, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Rugby School, in the English town of Rugby.
Interestingly, it seems that ‘gridiron’ comes from the fact that the way the playing field was originally marked out, resembled a grid iron. This was an iron grid used in the 14th century, to cook with over an open fire.
Today it occurred to me that the American word for footpath is ‘sidewalk’ which perfectly describes what it is. It is the side of the road, where it is safe to walk. Though somewhat odd because, from what I’ve seen and read, there’s not a lot of walking in America. I guess there was when the word came about.
One of my favourite Swedish words (among many) is ‘apelsin’ which translates to ‘Chinese apple’. Except it is the Swedish word for ‘orange’. The reason it is a Chinese apple is because the first oranges that came to Sweden were from China. Not having a word for them, the Swedes decided they must be the kind of apples they grow in China. Oddly, the Swedish word for the colour ‘orange’ is ‘orange’.
Swedish words were the order of (some of) the day as I returned to my regular language sessions with Nicoline. There was a bit of confusion as we started to use WhatsApp rather than the almost dead Skype but, eventually, we connected and had a jolly time.
Of course, the weather was glorious again, which was especially good because, the almost back to health Mirinda, went to the hairdresser. This was after she’d had a couple of Teams sessions with Portugal, so getting out of the study and away from the screen were of great need.
But, getting back to footpaths, which is where I started.
The majority of footpaths here in Sweden are nice and wide. This is because they are used by all and sundry be it on foot, bicycle, scooter, skates, snowshoes or rollerblades. They are extremely accommodating with their width.
This comes in very handy when work needs to be done on the road as was demonstrated to me this morning during my walks to and from the ICA. The construction people had closed off the footpath to the users and opened it up for one way traffic which included cars, trucks, graders, etc.
It wasn’t a massive inconvenience for footpath users because the roadworks were near pedestrian crossings, so they could cross over and walk through an estate car park for a little bit before crossing back. This is especially good because there’s only a footpath on one side of the road.
I have no idea what they are doing, but the trench they have created is huge. I’m guessing it’s for very big pipework. There’s another interesting word: pipework. Interesting, because, quite obviously, it does, which is why it is used for liquid transference.
