In the Nick of Time

Sometimes I come across an origin story that makes me shake my head and wonder, "Is this for real?" That was how I felt when reading about the phrase “In the Nick of Time” which has come to mean an action performed just before it is too late. 

It seems to have originated in the 18th century. People kept track of the money they owed to creditors with a stick - a tally The stick was carved with the number of days you had until the loan was due. If you paid before the last nick, then you didn’t owe interest on the debt. You made it in the nick of time.

Loanwords and Other Borrowings

I have posted a series of articles here recently about the words that have entered English from French, a process that began with the French-Norman conquest of England in 1066. Some people might refer to those words as "loanwords." But are they loanwords? 

A loanword is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language (the recipient or target language), through the process of borrowing. 

"Loan" or "borrow" may seem like odd descriptive words considering that nothing is taken away from the donor language and there is no expectation of returning anything, as in our typical usage of those words.

I had to research the term, and it gets more complicated. Loanwords may be contrasted with calques, in which a word is borrowed into the recipient language by being directly translated from the donor language rather than being adopted in (an approximation of) its original form. 

Some calques in English:
A word, skyscraper, from French gratte-ciel, literally to “scrape-sky.
A phrase, "moment of truth" from Spanish, "el momento de la verdad," meaning a critical turning point.
Superman comes from the German Übermensch, a Nietzschean concept, that later becomes the comic hero.
Brainwashing originates with the Chinese xǐnǎo (洗脑), literally translated as “wash brain.” 
Adam’s apple is a Latin borrowing of pomum Adami, a Biblical reference to the forbidden fruit.

The word "loanword" is itself a calque from German lehnwort, meaning a word borrowed from another language.

We also distinguish loanwords from cognates, which are words in two or more related languages that are similar because they share an etymological origin in the ancestral language, rather than because one borrowed the word from the other.

Here are a few -
          English  | Cognate Language  |  Cognate Word and Meaning

• Animal Spanish/French animal A living creature
• Hospital French/Spanish hôpital / hospital Medical facility
• Family French/Spanish famille / familia Group of related people
• Minute French/Spanish minute / minuto Unit of time
• Telephone French/Spanish téléphone / teléfono Communication device

Examples of loanwords in the English language:
 café (from French café, which means "coffee"), bazaar (from Persian bāzār, which means "market"), and kindergarten (from German Kindergarten, which literally means "children's garden"). 

Here's an oddity - the word calque is a loanword, while the word loanword is a calque
Calque comes from the French noun calque ("tracing; imitation; close copy"). Loanword and the phrase loan translation are translated from German nouns Lehnwort and Lehnübersetzung (German: [ˈleːnʔybɐˌzɛt͡sʊŋ]

Loans of multi-word phrases, such as the English use of the French term déjà vu, are known as adoptions, adaptations, or lexical borrowings.

Although colloquial and informal register loanwords are typically spread by word-of-mouth, technical or academic loanwords tend to be first used in written language, often for scholarly, scientific, or literary purposes.

Pen Names

Pseudonyms are "false" names or names that are not the true (given) names of an individual. They are one of a larger group of -onyms and -nyms (like synonyms and antonyms) in English - many more than we were taught in school.

Pseudonyms, when used by an author, are called pen names.

Some Famous Pen Names

Richard Bachman is Stephen King, 20th century American horror author

Acton Bell, Currer Bell, and Ellis Bell were the names used by Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, and Emily Brontë

Mary Westmacott is Agatha Christie, 20th century British mystery writer

Anthony Burgess is John Burgess Wilson, 20th century British writer, author of A Clockwork Orange.

Lewis Carroll is Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 19th century British author, mathematician, known best for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Sue Denim is used by Dav Pilkey, a writer and illustrator of the popular "Captain Underpants" children's book series and is also used by science fiction writer Lewis Shiner. Sue Denim is a parody of the word pseudonym itself.

Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), 20th century Danish author of Out of Africa

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), 20th-century American poet, novelist and memoirist

George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), 19th-century English novelist

C. S. Forester (Cecil Smith), 20th-century writer of the Captain Horatio Hornblower novels and The African Queen

O. Henry (William Sidney Porter), American author of short stories and novels

Hergé (Georges Remi), 20th-century Belgian comics writer and artist, famous worldwide for creating the Tintin series of books

Ann Landers (Esther Pauline Friedman), and Abigail Van Buren/Dear Abby (Pauline Esther Friedman Phillips), advice columnists

Stan Lee (Stanley Martin Lieber), comic book pioneer & Spiderman creator

Molière (Jean Baptiste Poquelin), 17th-century French theater writer, director and actor, and writer of comic satire.

George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair), 20th-century British author of Animal Farm and 1984

Ellery Queen     Frederic Dannay, and Manfred B. Lee shared this pen name for their 20th century detective fiction

Saki (Hector Hugh Munro), 20th-century British short story writer and satirist

George Sand (Armandine Lucie Aurore Dupin), 19th-century French novelist and early feminist

Dr. Seuss (Theodore Seuss Geisel), also used "Theo. LeSieg", 20th-century American writer and cartoonist best known for his books

Lemony Snicket is the listed author of A Series of Unfortunate Events but is really the pen name of Daniel Handler

Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle), 19th-century French writer

Mark Twain    Samuel Langhorn Clemens (also used "Sieur Louis de Conte" for his fictional biography of Joan of Arc) 19th-century American humorist, writer and lecturer

Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), 18th-century French Enlightenment writer, deist and philosopher.