1041. Today, we talk about the word "home" and its meaning beyond just a structure, and then we talk about false friends — words in different languages that don't mean what you think they mean.
1041. Today, we talk about the word "home" and its meaning beyond just a structure, and then we talk about false friends — words in different languages that don't mean what you think they mean.
The "home" segment was written by Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and the author of "Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English." You can find her at valeriefridland.com.
The "false friends" segment was written by Karen Lunde, a former Quick and Dirty Tips editor who has crafted hundreds of articles on the art of writing well. She was an online education pioneer, founding one of the first online writing workshops. These days, she provides writing tips and writing coach services at HelpMeWriteBetter.com.
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Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. Because of the holidays, you're getting this on Monday instead of Tuesday. We're going to do the same thing next week, and then we'll go back to the regular schedule.
Today, we'll talk about the word "home" and its meaning beyond just a structure, and then we'll talk about false friends — words in different languages that don't mean what you think they mean.
by Valerie Fridland
As many people head home for the holidays, it brings up the question of exactly what “home” means to us — not just why individuals are willing to brave the perils of modern holiday travel to get there, but also what the concept of "home" has meant to us over the history of English.
It is perhaps not that surprising that the word “home” is an old one, dating back to Old English “ham” or “hamum.” A similar word is also found in many languages related to English, such as the German “heim” or the Swedish “hem,” which tells us that it is a very ancient way to talk about where we're from, predating English by thousands of years.
In the word’s earliest use, it referred not just to a single home, but more often to a village or a small collection of dwellings that formed a community.
This is why many settlements during Old English times (in the 6th and 7th centuries) included the word “home” as part of their names – something that was preserved in modern place names that have a “ham” ending, as in Birmingham or Goodmanham. In essence, these place names originally meant something like “dwelling place of the Goodman clan.”
Over time, this sense of a collective village dropped out of use, and the word developed its more typical meaning today, of a fixed place where a person or family resides. However, the idea of belonging and community that the word first evoked persists in the way we feel about the places we come from being more than just a matter of geography.
This community sense of home is why, when you ask someone where they are from, most people interpret it as a question of heritage and identity, not just the physical location where they were born. For instance, in a study that asked adolescents in Australia to answer the question “Where are you from?” researchers found that out of 605 responses, relatively few simply stated a geographic place. Most respondents also added details about why they saw their identity tied to their homeland, ranging from, “I’m from Australia, because it's where I belong” to “Australia, because it is the best place in the world.”
The strong tendency to talk about much more than a physical location in answering the question suggests that “home” is about more than geography; it’s about our psychological and emotional experience of a place – something that harkens back to its original more collective meaning.
While many of us travel back home for the holidays, most of us don’t have the good fortune of returning home to a mansion; we simply inhabit a house. But at one point in time, a house and a mansion meant much the same thing – simply, a dwelling place. To understand the understated mansions of our past, we have to look back at the history of Anglo-Norman rule over England starting in the 11th century with the arrival of William the Conqueror.
After the Norman Invasion, a dialect of French became the language of government in England for several centuries, which brought a lot of French words, including “maison” (meaning house) into English. This word was from the classical Latin word, “mansion,” meaning “house” or “dwelling,” and both words were brought into English as borrowings via French after the 12th century.
But as often happened with French words when they had competing English counterparts (as in the already existing word “house”), the French word became gradually associated with the better, grander version of the thing the native English word described, despite having started off with much the same meaning. So, mansions became the places a lord lived, and everyone else just lived in plain old houses.
A similar process of associated French fanciness explains why we have dual names for animals and animal meat, for instance, "pig" versus "pork" and "cow" versus "beef." The word referring to the animal as served on a platter ("pork" or "beef") is typically the French borrowing, often what it was called when being served to the fancy folks by the servants who only talked about pigs and cows among themselves in the kitchen.
While maps pinpoint geographic spaces, places on a map are much more than longitude and latitude. Our ideas about what going “home” really means is bound up with a long history as well as with our own experiences and connections. So, whether you are headed to a house or a mansion this season, the most important thing to remember is that the original meaning of home centered on community – and that is what the holidays should really be about.
That segment was written by Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and the author of "Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English." You can find her at valeriefridland.com.
References
Starks, Donna and Taylor-Leech, Kerry. 2020. ““Where are you from?” Adolescent formulations of place identity.” Applied Linguistics Review, vol. 11, no. 1. pp. 27-53.
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “mansion, n.”, September 2023. https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/8670723691
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “home, n.¹ & adj.”, September 2023. https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/9487569112
Merriam Webster. "How English Got Frenchified." Accessed November 15, 2023. https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/norman-conquest-new-english-words
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/language-in-the-wild/202311/why-is-going-home-so-important-to-us
by Karen Lunde
Imagine your new neighbor, an English language learner from France, is helping you paint your living room. If you can't reach high enough to paint the trim, you could say, "Would you drag that chair over here?"
If your friend hasn't learned the English word "chair" yet, you might leave him wondering if your intentions are painting or something more sinister.
That's because in French, "chair" — spelled C-H-A-I-R but pronounced "shair" — doesn't refer to something you sit on (or in this case, stand on to reach a high place). In French, "chair" means "flesh." Yikes!
Welcome to the wild world of "false friends" in language!
So, what are "false friends"?
No, we're not talking about someone who says nice things to your face but then gossips about you behind your back. False friends are words that look or sound super similar in different languages but mean totally different things.
Ever had a twin-spotting moment? You know, when you see someone who looks exactly like your friend, but then they turn around and — nope, total stranger! That's exactly what happens with false friends in language. These words in other languages resemble words in English, so our brains think: "Oh, I know this!"
But just like with that stranger who looks like your friend, you might be in for a surprise. Let's meet some of these deceptive doubles that cause chaos in conversations.
In Spanish, "sopa" looks and sounds a lot like our word "soap," right? Well, nope: it actually means "soup"! So no, your Spanish-speaking friend isn't actually confessing to having soap for dinner.
Here's another Spanish trickster: "éxito." If you use this word to ask someone where the exit is, you're likely to get a puzzled look in return. That's because "éxito" doesn't mean "exit" in Spanish; it means "success." So, "Donde esta éxito?" literally means "Where is success?" in Spanish. It's more of a philosophical question than a practical one that will help you find the door.
If you're on a business trip in Mexico, and you turn up late for a meeting, it's probably best not to say, "Estoy tan embarazada" as you rush into the conference room. You haven't actually expressed shame, you've just told the whole room, "I'm so pregnant!" In Spanish, "embarazada" doesn't mean "embarrassed"; it means "pregnant." Whoops!
Next, imagine you leave the theater crying after seeing an emotional rollercoaster of a movie. Your companion comments in French, "Ah, si sensible!" Why would he call you "sensible" for crying, as if he's complimenting your good judgment? Well, he's actually saying you're a person who feels deeply. "Sensible" in French means "sensitive."
You might also want to avoid telling a French-speaking person who comments about often seeing you walk your dog down their street that you're trying to "make a habit of it." You of course mean that you're trying to make a habit of walking more — a good thing! But in French, "habit" doesn't refer to a "regular practice." It means "clothing" or "costume." Your French acquaintance might worry that you're secretly Cruella de Vil.
And if you're in Germany and someone offers you "rat," don't worry — they're not about to serve up a rodent on a silver platter. In German, "rat" means "advice." So don't run screaming; they're just trying to help.
And if a German is getting a "gift" to deal with a rodent, they aren't trying to be nice. "Gift" means "poison" in German.
So, you might be wondering how words got so mixed up across languages. Well, there are a few really cool reasons:
First, there's the evolution effect. Sometimes words begin from the same ancient root (like Latin) but evolve differently in various languages. It's kind of like how you and your siblings might have the same parents and upbringing but different personalities.
Then there's the borrowing blur. Languages love to borrow words from each other, but sometimes they change the meaning slightly — or completely! — when they do.
Coincidence plays a role, too. Sometimes words just happen to look or sound similar by complete accident.
So, why is English the rebel child of European languages?
The answer lies in English's unique and somewhat dramatic history. Although most European languages grew up like siblings under one roof (sharing Latin roots and constantly influencing each other), English had a more complicated childhood. Born into a Germanic family (like German and Dutch), as we said in the previous segment, English was suddenly thrust into a strange situation in 1066 when the Norman Conquest brought French-speaking nobles to rule England.
For about 300 years, England was like a house where the nobles upstairs spoke French while the common folk downstairs spoke Old English. This linguistic split personality helped English develop in ways its European cousins didn't.
But there's even more to the evolution of English. While other European languages kept their pronunciation relatively stable, English decided to shake things up like a rebellious teenager. Between the 1400s and 1600s, that’s roughly the period between Chaucer and Shakespeare, English went through its own dramatic phase called the Great Vowel Shift, where the pronunciation of vowels changed. It had a profound effect on how we pronounce and spell English words today.
So the next time you're learning a new language and find yourself in an awkward situation because of a false friend, remember: you're not alone! These linguistic mix-ups have been confusing (and amusing) language learners for centuries. They're like the practical jokes of the language world – frustrating sometimes, but they make for great stories later!
That segment was written by Karen Lunde, a former Quick and Dirty Tips editor who has crafted hundreds of articles on the art of writing well. She was an online education pioneer, founding one of the first online writing workshops. These days, she provides writing tips and writing coach services at HelpMeWriteBetter.com.
And finally, I have a familect story from Amy:
My name is Amy Frushar Kelly, and I am from New York. Here's our familect story.
Our family's go-to birthday greeting is "Hello, dentist!"
This goes back about 12 years when my partner's aunt ordered a cake for his cousin, and she specified the frosting should read "Happy Birthday, Dennis!" But the cake wasn't ready on time, the bakery offered to deliver it, and when we got the box open it was a beautiful sheet cake with the words "Hello, dentist!" in blue frosting.
Dennis thought it was great and that began a tradition of "Hello, dentist!" every year.
Thanks a lot.
Thanks, Amy. That's so funny; it's like something you'd see in a movie.
If you want to share your familect, a word of phrase your family uses based on some shared experience that nobody else would understand, you can do that in a voice chat on WhatsApp, or you can still call the voicemail line at 83-321-4-GIRL, and all of those are in the show notes, which you can find in your podcast listening app. I want to hear your stories!
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to Davina Tomlin and Nat Hoopes in marketing; Holly Hutchings in digital operations; Dan Feierabend in audio; Brannan Goetschius, director of podcasts; and Morgan Christianson in advertising, who keeps every greeting card her grandmother has ever sent her.
And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl and author of the tip-a-day book "The Grammar Daily." That's all. Thanks for listening.