The Spanish word 'nada' (nothing) stems from a Latin word meaning "born".

'No veo nada' (I don't see anything) comes from 'nōn videō rem nātam', literally "I don't see a born thing".

Here are the origins of 'niente', 'rien', 'ninguno' and many more Romance words for "nothing" and "no one":

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This popped up earlier and despite trying all sorts of verbal combinations in my head, I couldn’t for the life of me ‘get’ it. I had to dive into the comments and it turns out it’s one of those ‘separated by a common language’ things.

A fascinating and balanced insight into ‘Whorfianism’ and related ideas www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

A lot of native speakers of English use 'to lay' instead of 'to lie':
'I'm laying here.'

This isn't a recent thing:
it started in the 14th century.

Several sister languages of English, such as Frisian and Afrikaans, even merged the verbs for "to lie" and "to lay" completely.

Click for more:

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Happy birthday to the Dean of St Patrick’s, Dublin, author of Tale of a Tub, A Modest Proposal, and Gulliver’s Travels, and perhaps the greatest satirist who ever lived, born on this day in 1667.

Upon graduating medical school in 1881, Arthur Conan Doyle did a little doodle of himself waving his diploma over his head. The caption reads: "Licensed to Kill."

My next book, SLEUTH-HOUND, is about Conan Doyle's professor, Joseph Bell - the real-life Sherlock Holmes.

#skystorians #histmed

Thanksgiving at Mar-a-Lago.

Bluesky is well designed for sharing stuff, but it has inherited the strong Twitter preference for likes over reposts – and likes, though they have myriad uses, don't go anywhere here.

Reposts are much more to the fore on Mastodon, in my experience.

Not going to subscribe to any of these, but so much fun to scroll through! 😄