Roots/origins of words - does anyone else do this?

I once taught basic English to an Italian Catholic priest who had spent five years in a Church in Holland and had had to learn Dutch.

He recognised many one-syllable words based on farming like boat and cow. When the word "dung" cropped up he said "Oh, no. I didn't need that word for my Sunday sermons!"

Can anyone tell me about the word Bonny, I live in Derbyshire, but arrived here when I was ten.
My son was 8lbs 11 at birth way back in 1966. I was greatly encouraged in the maternity hospital to add rusk to his milk and therefore he was quite a chubby baby, gorgeous with very blue eyes and white blond hair.
I ran into an old boyfriend who called my son “Bonny”. I was quite put out by this as I took it to mean fat.
Over the years I’ve heard it used to mean beautiful. Can anyone clarify.

watermeadow: yes it is. See Poul Anderson's article "Uncleftish Beholding". This explains Atomic Theory in purely words derived from Old English. It is too long to be put here, and in any rate is under copyright, but you can read it at

groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=alt.language.artificial/ZL4e3fD7eW0/_7p8bKwLJWkJ

If you can write that, you could write almost anything

"Bonny" used to be used a lot in Northumbria. Especially "Bonny lad". I haven't heard it lately.
I always thought it came from the French for good - bon/bonne, and implied healthy and good-looking. Just a guess.

Wiki says also from Latin bonus.

In Scotland a bonny child is an attractive, thriving, healthy one with plenty of meat on his/her bones - not fat, just well-covered. I believe that derives from the French bon too, a remnant of the auld alliance, when France was an ally and England the enemy.

Other French imports into Scotland include "ashet" - a big serving dish, from French "assiette". "Petticoat tails" of shortbread were"petit gatelles".

"An orange" was originally "a norange" - Spanish naranja - until the n moved from one word to the other..

Surnames are interesting too. I sometimes ask my children if a friend comes from a certain area and they are surprised if I am right.

I was always delighted that I did Latin at school. Not only did it help with learning French (basically corrupted Latin) but was a source of fascination to my children when they were little - they loved me telling them about the derivation of words.

I've always been puzzled by the NE word 'gan/gannin' etc and looked into Wiktionary. The link rather put me off because it's so long and there are so many alternatives.
The nearest I could find was Old Dutch - to go.
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gan#Etymology_3

I like the German for hospital- krankenhaus!

I love etymology too. Did you know that “robot” was the only Czech word used in English?
Being bilingual, I get different words. I once had and argument with my father who maintained that “repair” was finer work than “mend”. I said that the only difference was the root... I didn’t win because my father was always right even if he was wrong!

grannyrebel7 - yes, German is great. If you do not have a word for it, chuck a few together: Fernsehapparat is a TV (a machine that sees a long way!); Bustenhalter is a bra (something to hold you bust up!) - a bit like the French soutien-gorge (hold up your throat?!).

Great stuff!

Surely "bonny/bonnie" can only be a good thing:

but the child that is born on the Sabbath day. Is bonny and blithe, and good and gay.

My bonnie lies over the ocean
My bonnie lies over the sea
My bonnie lies over the ocean
Oh, bring back my bonnie to me,....

Fennel There is at least one Scottish song with "gang" in it, meaning "go", the root was the same.
(The lassies with the yellow coaties were the women who worked at the fishing, gutting, packing, salting, and the like..... and the yellow garb was their mark of office.(

"Lassie wi the yellow coatie
Will ye wed a moorland jockie?
Lassie wi the yellow coatie
Will ye busk and gang wi me?"

www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RcszY0xQTo Recording of the very young Corries singing it - Ronnie Brown with dark hair! but you can't mistake Roy Williamson.

Busk is "kiss". I think buss was an English version. I think they re related to French "baiser", or maybe the sound of a kiss?.
To go off-piste for a moment, that word reminds me of a little poem dedicated to two renowned Victorian spinster lady educators, Miss Frances Mary Buss and Miss Dorothea Beale.

"Miss Buss and Miss Beale,
Cupid's darts do not feel.
How different from us,
Miss Beale and Miss Buss."

Let us gae tae Aberfayle, bonnie lassie, oh,
Where tis sunny as thasel, bonnie lassie oh . .

to the tune of "Let us haste to Kelvingrove . ." Same song but for those not oot o' the tap drawer.

I worked for an old lady who had a book on expressions and if we didn’t know their origins we would look them up. Eg to shoot the crow or jock thomsons bairns - sorry you’ll need to look them up I’ve forgotten.

I've been blessed over the years to meet people in the shipping industry and have learnt the source of some idioms.

'cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey' - Iron canon balls were kept on the deck on a brass holder, and when the weather was extremely cold, the holder would contract and the balls would pop off.

A 'son of a gun' referred to the sleeping quarters of seamen, usually the deck below the guns. It would be a derogatory term since it implied your mother was a prostitute.

Language is so interesting; I am always amazed how others learn a second language so quickly.

Regarding “gang” and “go” there is a clear connection with the German verb gehen - to go, the past participle of which is gegangen As in “he has gone/he went” = er ist gegangen

I regularly look up the origin of words, in particular slang words/cockney. I find it really interesting. e.g Don't have a pot to piss in" = They used to use urine to cure leather. Poor people would take their chamber pot down to the leather workers and sell it. If you were totally destitute, then you "wouldn't have a pot to piss in". I also look up origins of street names which can be an eyeopener - look up "Grope cu** Alley".

A Geordie friend once told me that some of the strongest Geordie dialect was still very similar to Danish or Norwegian.,

I heard something very similar in Melvyn Bragg’s Routes of English progs. some years ago. He related how he was sitting in a restaurant in Oslo, IIRC, when he heard someone say, ‘Well, I’m going home now,’ IIRC in exactly the same dialect as was spoken in his rural Cumbrian (IIRC) home.
He did a double take on realising that the speaker was Norwegian and speaking her own language!

Ditto about a group of servicemen from somewhere in the N of the U.K., spending a short time in Iceland during WW2, and finding that they could communicate quite well on a basic level with the locals, using their own (evidently leftover from Old Norse) dialect.

For many years we’ve had a Swedish friend and it was interesting to hear her say so many times when speaking Swedish on the phone, ‘bra’ (pronounced much like the Scots ‘braw’ (as in ‘bricht moonlicht nicht’) and meaning the same thing.

Crumbs Evie - not an address you’d want to have to give a Deliveroo driver! ??????

The word 'dog' is from Old English, but no-one can find it before then. Hound was the more usual word to use , now a hound is a more specific type of, well, dog.

I apologise in advance for the long story here. Sn Tobias Dantzig's Number and the Language of Science, Dantzig tells the story of a crow who had built its nest in the watch-tower on a squire's estate. The squire was determined to shoot the crow, but the crow was too canny - whenever the squire or his men would enter the tower, the crow would fly away until the coast was clear. The squire tried sending two men went into the barn. One stayed hidden in the tower and one came out again. However, the crow was too smart and wouldn't return until the second man also came out. The experiment was tried on successive days - unsuccessfully - until finally five men went in and only four came out. The crow seemed to think that all the men had come out, and returned to the watch-tower. The squire was finally rid of the crow. The story seems to demonstrate that crows (or at least the crow in the story) have a sense of one, two, three and many. When five men went in and four came out, the crows saw many go in and many go out and thought they were safe. Early twentieth century anthropologists found that the numeric systems of some African, South American, Oceanic and Australian cultures were also limited like the crows. In the case of the Australian Aborigines, they had numbers for one through six and many.

Jock tampons bairns
7 Aug 2003 · The Reverend John Thomson {Jock Tamson} was a much-loved minister of Duddingston Kirk, Edinburgh from 1805 to 1840. He called the members of his congregation 'ma bairns' {my children ...