Showing posts with label family. Show all posts
Showing posts with label family. Show all posts
Friday, February 18, 2011
Happy Kindred Day!
It's the beginning of a long weekend in some Canadian provinces, with Monday's holiday called "Family Day" here in Ontario and in Alberta. So, a good time to look at the surprising origin of the word “family”: the Latin word famulus (servant). From famulus came the word familia (a household of servants), and this is what “family” meant when it entered English in the 1400s.(When I was a teenager, a favourite reproach from my mother was “You treat this place like a hotel!”; had she but known, I was merely being a precocious etymologist.) It was not until surprisingly late, the mid-1600s, that the word came to mean a group of people related to one another. Before that, we used the Anglo-Saxon “kin” and “kindred”.
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About Me
- Katherine Barber
- Canada's Word Lady, Katherine Barber is an expert on the English language and a frequent guest on radio and television. She was Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary. Her witty and informative talks on the stories behind our words are very popular. Contact her at wordlady.barber@gmail.com to book her for speaking engagements; she can tailor her talks to almost any subject. She is also available as an expert witness for lawsuits.