☎ some word origins: *I did not write any of these, they all came from 'A Dictionary of Word Origins' by John Ayto. It's a really good etymology book. Ham: The etymological meaning of ham is 'bend' - it comes from Germanic *kham- 'be crooked' - and up until the 16th century it denoted exclusively the 'part of the leg at the back of the knee' (a portion of the anatomy now without a word of its own in English). Hamstring reflects this original meaning. From the mid-16th century, it gradually extended semantically to 'back of the thigh' and hence 'thigh' generally, and by the 17th century it was being used for the 'thigh of a slaughtered animal, especially a pig, preserved and used for food. Ham in the sense 'preformer who overacts,' first recorded in the late 19th century, apparently comes from an earlier hamfatter 'bad actor,' which may have been inspired but the Negro minstrel song 'The Ham-fat Man.' Cool: Cool comes from the same source as cold, namely Indo-European *gel- *gol (from which English also congeal, gel-, and jelly). The Germanic descendants of this Indo-European base were *kal- *kol-. From these were derived the Germanic adjective *koluz, which passed into Old English as cold. Its use for 'fashionable, hip is mid 20th century, but its nonchalant application to large sums of money is of surprisingly longstanding: 'I just made a couple of bets with him and took up a cool hundred, and so went to the King's Arms,' John Vanbrugh and Colly Cibber, The Provok'd Husband 1728. Interest: The latin verb interesse meant literally 'be between' (it was a compound of inter 'between' and esse 'be'). It was used metaphorically for 'be of concern, be important, matter,' and appears to have been borrowed into Anglo-Norman as a noun meaning 'way one has a legal concern in or share of.' English took this over in the 14th century as interesse, but it gradually changed over the next hundred years or so into interest, mainly due to the influence of Old French interest 'damage,' which came from the third person present singular form of the latin verb. the main modern sense 'curiosity' developed towards the end of the 18th century. Sorry for the bad quality, image of a tree. If you want a better version, find it here - https://www.theguardian.com/education/gallery/2015/jan/23/a-language-family-tree-in-pictures I hope you enjoyed these origins, the selection of words was inspired by a conversation with
