Scripts and screenplays are very interesting examples of this. Manuscript is a handwritten script (manual script), which seems a bit redundant before modern presses. A screenplay is a play written for the (silver) screen. i.e. a mirror upon which a film projector bounced off images from.
It only just occurred to me that a playwright is not someone who writes plays but akin to a Cartwright.
Mesopotamia—literally “between the rivers. “
Hippopotamus—water horse
Welcome—“well-come”—coming in a state of wellness (I don’t know if this approximates the modern health connotations, or is more general ‘goodness’ which may have in older forms of English indistinguishable). It reminds me of the Modern Greek expression γειά σου/σας literally “good health to you”.
Speaking of metaphors and Greek, there’s a lovely anecdote about the whimsy of seeing in Greece moving vans emblazoned with the word ‘metaphora’ on them. It being a compound word which originally meant to carry from one place to another. Which metaphorically is what a linguistic metaphor does: carry meaning from one topos to another.
Related; when you never realized a compound word had a literal meaning....
Cup board—board to put cups on—cupboard
Medi terrain—between two continents—Mediterranean
Etc.
Scripts and screenplays are very interesting examples of this.
Manuscript is a handwritten script (manual script), which seems a bit redundant before modern presses. A screenplay is a play written for the (silver) screen. i.e. a mirror upon which a film projector bounced off images from.
It only just occurred to me that a playwright is not someone who writes plays but akin to a Cartwright.
Mesopotamia—literally “between the rivers. “
Hippopotamus—water horse
Welcome—“well-come”—coming in a state of wellness (I don’t know if this approximates the modern health connotations, or is more general ‘goodness’ which may have in older forms of English indistinguishable). It reminds me of the Modern Greek expression γειά σου/σας literally “good health to you”.
Speaking of metaphors and Greek, there’s a lovely anecdote about the whimsy of seeing in Greece moving vans emblazoned with the word ‘metaphora’ on them. It being a compound word which originally meant to carry from one place to another. Which metaphorically is what a linguistic metaphor does: carry meaning from one topos to another.
I only realised the latter when I saw the Dutch word for this “middellandse zee”. The sea in the middle of the lands.
“Terranean” had never scanned separately to me