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By Anatoly Liberman
This story might be titled “Some Words Have a Reputation to Live Up To,” Part 2 (Part 3 will soon follow). While tracing the convoluted history of charade, I promised to devote some space to charlatan. The element char- unites them, and in scholarly works they have frequently been mentioned in one breath. Clearly, a charlatan knows how to dupe the public, and bringing him to book is hard. It proved to be equally hard to discover the origin of the word. Opinions on the etymology of charlatan are divided. Some reliable dictionaries say bluntly: “Of unknown origin,” while others offer, albeit cautiously, what seems to be a good hypothesis. (more…)
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By: Rebecca,
on 9/12/2007
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By Anatoly Liberman
The Devil is uppermost in people’s thoughts, and his names are many. One of them is Old Nick. Its origin is obscure. The word nicker “water sprite,” explained as an old participle “(a) washed one,” is unrelated to it. Then there is nickel. The term was easy to coin, but copper could not be obtained from the nickel ore, and Axel F. von Cronstedt, a Swedish mineralogist despite von before Cronstedt, called the copper-colored metal copper nickel (German Kupfernickel), later shortened to nickel, after the name of a perfidious mountain demon (wolfram and especially cobalt have a similar history). (more…)
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