language

Linguist Danny Bate with a beginner’s guide to etymology: which dictionaries to use (he’s a Wiktionary man), how to strip a word back to its roots, and how spelling gives away where a word came from. A Y standing in for a vowel usually points to Greek. The CH in chef sounds different from the one in chair because French lent us the two words centuries apart.

Along the way: the math in aftermath is mowing, not arithmetic, and a midwife is a “with-woman”. Nobody is quite sure where dog comes from.

Luke Taylor on the vocabulary of Italian football, and why he’d rather it stayed untranslated. He works through four terms: the fantasista, catenaccio, fare risultato and the regista. The catenaccio section goes furthest: Antonio Negri once read the word as a working-class system, a way for a side with less talent to survive by being better organised. Rather more interesting than its current job as a synonym for parking the bus.