English And Dutch Erosion

My new favourite idiom is 画蛇添足 basically meaning to ruin something by overdoing it

Quite literally ‘draw snake add feet’

Pinyin: Huàshé tiānzú

Traditional: 畫蛇添足

Found a new language practice app!

Polygloss has you describe an image in your target language so another player can guess it. It encourages creative answers. The game works for people of all levels — you can describe simple pictures or try your hand at wordplay.

It has plenty of options and will let you add any language you’d like — tho it’ll probably be more difficult to find people to play with.

Charles, Kerls & churls

English has the word churl, meaning 'rude, ill-bred, boorish person'. This word is not only related to German Kerl and Dutch kerel ('guy; dude') but also to the name Charles. Carolus, the Latin ancestor of Charles, was borrowed from a Germanic word meaning 'freeman', a variant of which became English churl. Click the graphic for more.

That's my boy Tardi. All he wanted was some privacy, which seems hard to get now, seeing as you found him in the vast expanse of a world he lives in.

Just a drop is enough…

Just a drop…

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Matricaria chamomilla

Let's start this year strong ᕕ(⌐■_■)ᕗ

more plant illustrations are waiting on my ko-fi!

Feuer & feu

The German word Feuer looks a bit like French feu and both mean 'fire'. That's a coincidence, because they're not etymologically related in any way. Feuer, like English fire, comes from West Germanic *fuir, while feu stems from the unrelated Latin word focus, 'hearth', which only later came to mean 'fire'. Focus was borrowed into English and many other languages as focus, its meaning 'focus (of a lens; of an ellipse)' created by Johannes Kepler. My new infographic tells you all about these words.