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I bet you didnt know that

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As people here work in various jobs / professions they might know things from work or study no one here knows yet. this is what this topic is about.

what do you know that we have never heard of?

Eg: you don't need to be great at maths to be an architect

this is obvious to me but everyone says to me "i wanted to be an architect but i was bad at math,i can barely add"

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Realt Dearg Sec

quickbeam wrote: »

I always thought that "quare" in the Dublin vernacular was simply a Dublin prononciation of "queer".

It is, although I'd say the survival of the Wexford usage might be because of the fact that quare=queer=unusual. So that "he's quare tall" means "he's unusually tall" in common usage. That's always how I understood it (it's pretty common in Kilkenny as well)

Ipso

EndaHonesty wrote: »

"You facking rabbit"?!!

Nope I'm not buying it...

I'm guessing a more Germanic origin.

I think Dutch, Coney island in New York is supposed to be named after rabbits.
Off to Wikipedia to see the root of rabbit and why coinin and a dutch word sound similar but why rabbit isn't.

New Home

"Hell" and "damn" have an obvious religious origin, cursing someone to be damned and to go to hell for all eternity was very serious indeed.

"Bloody" seems to have a more complex etymology:

Use of the adjective bloody as a profane intensifier predates the 18th century. Its ultimate origin is unclear, and several hypotheses have been suggested.

It may be a direct loan of Dutch bloote, used "in the adverbial sense of entire, complete, pure, naked", which was suggested by Ker (1837) to have been "transformed into bloody, in the consequently absurd phrases of bloody good, bloody bad, bloody thief, bloody angry, etc., where it simply implies completely, entirely, purely, very, truly, and has no relation to either blood or murder, except by corruption of the word."[1]

The word "blood" in Dutch and German is used as part of minced oaths, in abbreviation of expressions referring to "God's blood", i.e. the Passion or the Eucharist. Ernest Weekley (1921) relates English usage to imitation of purely intensive use of Dutch bloed and German Blut in the early modern period.

A popularly reported theory suggested euphemistic derivation from the phrase by Our Lady. This possibility was discussed disapprovingly by Eric Partridge (1933). The contracted form by'r Lady is common in Shakespeare's plays around the turn of the 17th century, and Jonathan Swift about 100 years later writes both "it grows by'r Lady cold" and "it was bloody hot walking to-day"[2] suggesting that bloody and by'r Lady had become exchangeable generic intensifiers. However, Partridge describes the supposed derivation of bloody as a further contraction of by'r lady as "phonetically implausible". According to Rawson's dictionary of Euphemisms (1995), attempts to derive bloody from minced oaths for "by our lady" or "God's blood" are based on the attempt to explain the word's extraordinary shock power in the 18th to 19th centuries, but they disregard that the earliest records of the word as an intensifier in the 17th to early 18th century do not reflect any taboo or profanity. It seems more likely, according to Rawson, that the taboo against the word arose secondarily, perhaps because of an association with menstruation.[3]

The Oxford English Dictionary prefers the theory that it arose from aristocratic rowdies known as "bloods", hence "bloody drunk" means "drunk as a blood".

eisenberg1

Ipso wrote: »

I think the c word shares an origin with a word for rabbit. Think coinin.

Of French origin I think, cunny.

Ipso

eisenberg1 wrote: »

Of French origin I think, cunny.

It seems to be a wider Indo-European origin and rabbit may be a French word for the young, which then stuck.
Regarding French words and animals; in English we use words like cow, pig and chicken but the words for the meat are beef, pork and poultry.
Supposedly when the Normans landed in England the French words (basically upper class) ended up being used for the cooked versions but the English pleb words remained for the animals.

Ipso

Realt Dearg Sec wrote: »

It is, although I'd say the survival of the Wexford usage might be because of the fact that quare=queer=unusual. So that "he's quare tall" means "he's unusually tall" in common usage. That's always how I understood it (it's pretty common in Kilkenny as well)

Wexford is a quare place alright.

Realt Dearg Sec

Ipso wrote: »

Wexford is a quare place alright.

It's quare nice all the same though.

Realt Dearg Sec

Ipso wrote: »

It seems to be a wider Indo-European origin and rabbit may be a French word for the young, which then stuck.
Regarding French words and animals; in English we use words like cow, pig and chicken but the words for the meat are beef, pork and poultry.
Supposedly when the Normans landed in England the French words (basically upper class) ended up being used for the cooked versions but the English pleb words remained for the animals.

This reminds me of the interesting division in the English language between its Germanic roots and its more recent Latinate influences. The majority of our most used words are Germanic, as you would expect from a Germanic tongue. But the overwhelming majority of new words in English since the Norman invasion of England have been Latinate. One effect of this is that we often have two or more words that mean the same thing, and very frequently we find that one of these words has a Germanic origin and the other a Latinate one. For example flesh and viands, are both words for meat. A King and a regent, swine and pork. We can start something or we can commence something.

It's also not a coincidence that, almost invariably, the more prestigious sounding word in each of these cases (the latter in the above examples) is the Latinate one, because that was the word introduced by French-speaking aristocrats rather than the English-speaking great unwashed.

Incidentally some people claim that our tendency to use different words for the animals and their meat is down to this too. Sheep is Germanic, mutton is Latinate, cow is Germanic, beef is Latinate. Some suggest, plausibly, this reflects that English speaking people working on farms referred to animals, and didn't differentiate that from the animal's meat, while wealthy French-speaking or French-influenced people were dealing with the meat, not the animals themselves. (Interestingly while cow is a Germanic word, cattle is Latinate. We think of it as a plurality of cows but the word comes from chatel, meaning property, same as chattel slaves).

Ipso

Interesting about cows. I mentioned Brian Boru earlier, I think Boru means cattle tribute. And then you have The Tain where kingdoms go to war over a cow.

Supposedly the Sanskrit word for war means a desire for more cows.
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-the-sanskrit-word-for-war.htm

pickarooney

Senna wrote: »

They often say that all the gold in the world could fit into a large house. But scientists say there is enough gold in the ground to cover the surface of the earth with a 4 meter thick layer of pure gold.
Of course most is in the core and not accessible.

There is also 20000000 tons of gold in the waters of the earth's oceans, but it is so dilute that getting it out of the water is near impossible, plenty of companies have tried to work out an efficient way to extract, but it will never be cheaper than just mining it.

A drop of sea water is worth a billion dollars in that case.

Trust me, I'm a homeopath.

pickarooney

Realt Dearg Sec wrote: »

It is, although I'd say the survival of the Wexford usage might be because of the fact that quare=queer=unusual. So that "he's quare tall" means "he's unusually tall" in common usage. That's always how I understood it (it's pretty common in Kilkenny as well)

Fingal had a similar Norman dialect at the time.

pickarooney

Ipso wrote: »

I think Dutch, Coney island in New York is supposed to be named after rabbits.
Off to Wikipedia to see the root of rabbit and why coinin and a dutch word sound similar but why rabbit isn't.

Rabbits were called 'cunnies' or 'conies' in some northern English dialects. The former is sometimes used as a childish term for vagina in North America but that may be a coincidence. French, Spanish, German, Latin and Greek all use related words for either rabbit or vagina but rarely for both.

Capt'n Midnight

Mary Toft tricked doctors into believing that she had given birth to rabbits.

Esel

EndaHonesty wrote: »

"You facking rabbit"?!!

Nope I'm not buying it....

Hey - you try it you buy it!

[Deleted User]

eisenberg1 wrote: »

That makes sense now. I noticed before that wexford used the word in a different context...as in "he's quare tall" whereas in Dublin itnwould be " he's a quare (strange) sort".

It's just a pronunciation of queer. There's a quare stretch in the evening, he's a bit quare, some quare young ones about tonight. Wexford dialect my arse.

Yourself isit

Realt Dearg Sec wrote: »

The main thing I learned from history in university was that you could fill a warehouse with the amount of stuff we were taught was history in school that turned out to be total nonsense.

Incidentally an interesting fact about Viking Dublin is that it was primarily a slave city. It hosted a very large slave market where both Irish and foreign slaves were traded and sent away to places as far apart as Iceland (where a huge percentage of the population has Irish ancestry as a result) and Anatolia, modern Turkey.

Certainly any notion that the Gaelic chieftains were in a grand battle to protect themselves from the invading Vikings is nonsense, the Vikings were in Ireland for centuries and were just one more force (actually several forces) in a very complex system of alliances and enmities which gave rise to the Battle of Clontarf.

The 12th C books on brian Boru like Cogadh Gaedhil re Gallaibh would disagree of course.

Modern historians tend to a non-nationalist histography. This is more about the interpretation of facts rather than the facts. We rarely find much new source material.

Booms

Deleted User wrote: »

It's just a pronunciation of queer. There's a quare stretch in the evening, he's a bit quare, some quare young ones about tonight. Wexford dialect my arse.

Erse is an Old English word for Irish/Irish Gaelic.

Unless you live in Dublin4, in which case see above post.:D

Realt Dearg Sec

Yourself isit wrote: »

Realt Dearg Sec wrote: »

The main thing I learned from history in university was that you could fill a warehouse with the amount of stuff we were taught was history in school that turned out to be total nonsense.

Incidentally an interesting fact about Viking Dublin is that it was primarily a slave city. It hosted a very large slave market where both Irish and foreign slaves were traded and sent away to places as far apart as Iceland (where a huge percentage of the population has Irish ancestry as a result) and Anatolia, modern Turkey.

Certainly any notion that the Gaelic chieftains were in a grand battle to protect themselves from the invading Vikings is nonsense, the Vikings were in Ireland for centuries and were just one more force (actually several forces) in a very complex system of alliances and enmities which gave rise to the Battle of Clontarf.

The 12th C books on brian Boru like Cogadh Gaedhil re Gallaibh would disagree of course.

Modern historians tend to a non-nationalist histography. This is more about the interpretation of facts rather than the facts. We rarely find much new source material.

Well I have my reservations about revisionism and its influence on Irish historiography, but I think a healthy skepticism about sources like that is one of the better legacies of people like Moody etc, regardless of the underlying ideological motivations of their own supposed objectivity.

Yourself isit

Realt Dearg Sec wrote: »

Well I have my reservations about revisionism and its influence on Irish historiography, but I think a healthy skepticism about sources like that is one of the better legacies of people like Moody etc, regardless of the underlying ideological motivations of their own supposed objectivity.

A 21st reading of a 12th C text is just that. A different reading. Facts remain the same.

It's true that the Dublin Vikings traded with the irish (as well as enslaving others) , some could be called hiberno-norse having been born here, some married irish women, some irish chieftains allied themselves with Vikings for political reasons but....

In the early years of English settlements in the Americas something similar happened. The settlers traded with the native Americans, spoke their language sometimes (but primarily spoke English) and often took native wives. They made political alliances with some tribes against others.

If native Americans could have allied together however and had kicked the settlers out it would have been fair to call that a victory against the settlers. Against foreigners

wexandproud

Ipso wrote: »

Wexford is a quare place alright.

its quare nice here this morning but there is hure of a wind.
dont know if spelling is correct but the word hure is often used to describe something as terrible or bad . have often heard the word quare used to describe someone , and its nothing to do with sexuality but usually strange in their ways

yer wan is a bit quare and her husband is a hure for the drink but he's a quare nice fella .. translates something like .. that girl is a bit strange and her husband likes a drink but he is a very nice man

eisenberg1

Deleted User wrote: »

It's just a pronunciation of queer. There's a quare stretch in the evening, he's a bit quare, some quare young ones about tonight. Wexford dialect my arse.

Yes it is a different pronunciation, but in my experience, the word is used differently in different places, as already discussed.

IvyTheTerrible

If you are out in the open, you can work out when the sun will set with your fingers.
Extend your arm, and see how many fingers you can fit between the bottom of the sun and the horizon. Each finger is about 15 minutes.

tomwaterford

IvyTheTerrible wrote: »

If you are out in the open, you can work out when the sun will set with your fingers.
Extend your arm, and see how many fingers you can fit between the bottom of the sun and the horizon. Each finger is about 15 minutes.

But the sun will blind you in such a circumstance ?

Though with arms out stretched from tip to tip of fingers is equal to your height

IvyTheTerrible

tomwaterford wrote: »

But the sun will blind you in such a circumstance ?

Though with arms out stretched from tip to tip of fingers is equal to your height

You don't look directly into the sun, but underneath it!

FrancieBrady

IvyTheTerrible wrote: »

You don't look directly into the sun, but underneath it!

Can't believe you had to explain that.

MonkieSocks

IvyTheTerrible wrote: »

You don't look directly into the sun,!

What about page 3

Dtp1979

tomwaterford wrote: »

Though with arms out stretched from tip to tip of fingers is equal to your height

Nope

theoneeyedman

MonkieSocks wrote: »

What about page 3

That'll make you blind too!

Are Am Eye

IvyTheTerrible wrote: »

If you are out in the open, you can work out when the sun will set with your fingers.
Extend your arm, and see how many fingers you can fit between the bottom of the sun and the horizon. Each finger is about 15 minutes.

Reverse this if you're in the southern hemisphere.

Realt Dearg Sec

Are Am Eye wrote: »

Reverse this if you're in the southern hemisphere.

I've read this ten times and I still don't know what you mean. Reverse what?

EDIT: But on an eleventh reading...jesus I'm slow.