One of the things I love about the English language is how interrelated so many of its words are. For example, when I was looking up the meaning of “kenspeckle” (a Scots word that means “well-known” or “conspicuous”), I was curious if the “speck” part was related to “spectacle.” I didn’t find a definitive answer, but my research led me to realize that there is a whole series of spec/spic words in English that all come from the same Latin root: special, species, specimen, spectacle, spectrum, speculate, inspect, prospect, suspect, perspective, perspicuous, conspicuous, etc. It blew my mind.
Later, as I was writing the word “incorporate” I realized that the meaning of it was probably literally “to add into a body.” That turned out to be true. For a word so obviously derived from Latin, you can make an intuitive leap with some confidence that you’re right.
But English gets its words from so many sources that it’s especially tricky. One day, as I was writing the word “bully,” I wondered if it might mean literally “like a bull.” Wouldn’t that make so much sense? But, according to Merriam-Webster, “The earliest meaning of English bully was ‘sweetheart.’ The word was probably borrowed from Dutch boel, ‘lover.'” The word then went through a series of transformations that took it from referring to a “good fellow” to a “blustering daredevil” to its current meany-pants definition. I never would have or could have guessed that.
English pronunciations are tricky, too. A recent discussion about how to pronounce the last name “Hough” (usually “huff,” but sometimes “how”) made me consider how many ways there are in English to pronounce “-ough.” There are more even than I had realized. My favorite case is the word “slough,” which rhymes with “cuff,” “cow,” or “coo,” depending on how it’s used. Though I never use the word to describe a swampy area, it always reminds me of the “Slough of Despond,” which I learned about in high school.