Loan Words

A loan word (also loanword or loan-word) is a word adopted from one language into a different language without translation.

In English we use the French café to mean a small restaurant selling light meals and drinks (from French café, which literally means "coffee").

The Persian bāzār, meaning a market, is also a loan word to English.

Many words are loaned from Latin. Modus Operandi  refers to someone’s habits or method of operating. It is heard most commonly in police investigations to to describe someone’s criminal profile and is usually abbreviated to "MO."

A number of legal and business terms are taken from Latin but have found their way into common usage. Mea culpa (my own fault) is used by a person who is admitting guilt or blame. Quid pro quo (literally, "something for something") is often used in negotiations . The idiom "You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours," is a variation on this.

"Loan" itself is a bit of an odd choice of a word to describe this language  transfer since the ordinary meaning of loan is something borrowed that will be returned. No returns on these words

From German, we borrowed "kindergarten" (children's garden) for that first year of school that was once a kind of pre-school where play and socialization was originally emphasized.

Foods offer many examples of loan words as we borrow dishes from other cultures. The Spanish taco, burrito and the rest of a Mexican restaurants menu are examples.

If you want to dig deeper into this linguistically, you will find that a loanvword is distinguished from a calque (loan translation), which is a word or phrase whose meaning or idiom is adopted from another language by translation into existing words or word-forming roots of the recipient language.

Rose of Sharon and Lily of the Valley

One flower commonly referred to in America as a "Rose of Sharon"

The Rose of Sharon and Lilies of the Valley are two of a number of flowers referenced in some translations of the Bible. However, there are many translations and interpretations of what the actual flower being referenced is in our modern taxonomy.

Rose of Sharon is a common name used to describe different species of flowering plants. It is not an actual rose but generally a member of Rosaceae.

The name "rose of Sharon" first appears in English in 1611 in the King James Version of the Bible. In the song of Solomon ch2 v1 the speaker (the beloved) says "I am the rose of Sharon, the lily of the valley".

Earlier translations had called it “the flower of the field.” Other translations of the Hebrew word hasharon are translated as rose, lily jonquil and crocus and some scholars have suggested that the Biblical "rose of Sharon" may also be a tulip or narcissus or simply a sprouting bulb.

The Biblical interpretations are many, including:
- A kind of crocus growing as a lily among the brambles ("Sharon", Harper's Bible Dictionary)
- A crocus that grows in the coastal plain of Sharon (New Oxford Annotated Bible);
- Lilium candidum, more commonly known as the Madonna lily, a species of lily suggested by some botanists, though likely in reference to the lilies of the valley mentioned in the second part of Song of Solomon 2:1.

Lily of the valley (or lily-of-the-valley) has the scientific name Convallaria majalis. It is a sweetly scented, but highly poisonous woodland flowering plant that is native throughout the cool temperate Northern Hemisphere in Asia, and Europe.

Scientists place it in the subfamily Nolinoideae which was formerly the family Ruscaceae - which sounds very similar to the Rosaceae of the Rose of Sharon and earlier it had been in the lily family Liliaceae.

This is also known as Our Lady's tears or Mary's tears. These names come from Christian legends that it sprang from the weeping of the Virgin Mary during the crucifixion of Jesus.

The name "lily of the valley" is used in some English translations of the Bible in Song of Songs 2:1, but the Hebrew phrase "shoshannat-ha-amaqim" in the original text (literally "lily of the valleys") does not refer to this plant but probably some other true lily.

The modern flower given this name is used symbolically as a symbol of humility and a sign of Christ's second coming and a vision of a better world.

Titles from Shakespeare

William Shakespeare has not only been credited as being the source of many words in English that he either coined or made popular, but he also is the source many writers have gone to for their own book titles.

His play Antony and Cleopatra gave Joyce Carol Oates her title New Heaven, New Earth. Eva Figes's Seven Ages and Francoise Sagan's Salad Days also used that play with phrases that entered the language.

Hamlet may be the most popular play for grabbing titles: Richard Matheson: What Dreams May Come; Edith Wharton: The Glimpses of the Moon; Peter Spence: To the Manor Born; Philip K. Dick: Time Out of Joint; Isaac Asimov: The Gods Themselves; Aldous Huxley: Mortal Coils; Graham Greene: The Name of Action.

David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest comes from Hamlet's speech: "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy."

For his novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley went to Shakespeare’s The Tempest.  In that play, the very naive Miranda who has lived her whole life on an island knowing only her father (the wizard Prospero) and some "spirits," meets men her own age for the first time when they are shipwrecked. Seeing them, Miranda says: "O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't!"

The popular young adult novel (and film), The Fault in Our Stars by John Green takes its title from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The scheming Cassius says, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”  Though cassius was referring to why their rank and power were below Caesar's, the novel is more on the idea that we should not blame fate for our state, but ourselves.

Pale Fire, a novel by Vladmir Nabokov, references the more obscure play Timon of Athens.
“The sun ’s a thief, and with his great attraction
Robs the vast sea; the moon ’s an arrant thief,
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun...”

Titles have also come from lines in Shakespeare's sonnets, such as Anthony Burgess' Nothing Like the Sun and Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.

Amazon

The Amazon.com home page in 1999

Amazon.com, also known simply as Amazon, was founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos.

Bezos incorporated the company as "Cadabra" in 1994 as a play on the "magical" incantation "abracadabra." A year later, he changed the name because he was told it was heard as "cadaver" and a dead body is not a good association for a company.

Bezos also bought the domain relentless.com for possible use, but was told by friends it soiunded too sinister. and briefly considered naming his online store Relentless, but friends told him the name sounded a bit sinister.

The company went online as Amazon.com in 1995.

Bezos selected the name Amazon in a dictionary search wanting an "A" name that would be high on an alphabetized list (an old print phone book idea) and because the Amazon river was by far the "biggest" river in the world, and it matched his goal to be the biggest store in the world. The current logo features a curved "smile arrow" leading from A to Z, representing that the company carries every product from A to Z.

The Amazon River (originally called Río Santa María del Mar Dulce, or Mar Dulce, "sweet sea" because of its fresh water pushing out into the ocean) took on its current name from another Spanish explorer, Francisco de Orellana. He was the first European man to travel from the river's sources in the Andes to the end of the river. He used the name Amazonas because the natives that attacked his expedition were mostly women and he was reminded of the woman warriors, the Amazons, from Hellenic culture. The Amazons were real Scythian women who fought and later were mythologized by the Greeks.

Abracadabra

Abracadabra is an incantation used, primarily in stage magic tricks for entertainment purposes.
But in its origin story was an ancient belief that the incantation had healing powers.

The word's origin is not clear, but it is often listed as Aramaic from a phrase meaning "I create as I speak." The etymology is not confirmed. Wikipedia says that the phrase in Aramaic אברא כדברא would be more accurately translated as "I create like the word."

The origin stories are numerous: an abbreviated forms of the Hebrew words for "father, son, holy spirit,"; a reference to Abraxas, a god worshiped in Alexandria in pre-Christian times.

The first known mention of the word was in the third century AD in a book called Liber Medicinalis  by Quintus Serenus Sammonicus, physician to the Roman emperor Caracalla. It was he who prescribed wearing an amulet containing the word written in the form of a triangle for several lethal diseases.

It was used by the Gnostics of the sect of Basilides, and is found on Abraxas stones, which were worn as amulets.

The Puritans dismissed the word as having any power, but some Londoners posted the word on their doorways to ward off sickness during the Great Plague of London.

English occultist Aleister Crowley believed it had power and used the spelling abrahadabra.

Today, it is best known as it is used by stage magicians when performing a trick. It is also common in the popular culture in comic books, games, music, film and television and literature.

J.K. Rowling said in a talk in 2004 that the incantation Avada Kedavra in her Harry Potter books (known as the "killing curse") "is the original of abracadabra, which means 'let the thing be destroyed.' Originally, it was used to cure illness and the 'thing' was the illness, but I decided to make it the 'thing' as in the person standing in front of me. I take a lot of liberties with things like that. I twist them round and make them mine."