Quotes About Origins

No existing form of anthropoid ape is even remotely related to the stock which has given rise to man.

the linguist David Dalby suggests that the use of bad and wicked to convey positive rather than negative feelings originates in African languages such as Bambara, where there are 'frequent uses of negative terms … to describe positive extremes'. Dalby traces the habit of saying uh-huh to the same source.6 Another

I can remember being surprised to find that kiosk is Turkish – as may be the card game bridge – and that berserk, like geyser and narwhal, is Icelandic: it seems to derive from the name of the bearskin coats worn by the fiercest Norse warriors.

He portrays the labours of the etymologist in whimsical terms: 'In search of the progenitors of our speech, we may wander from the tropick to the frozen zone, and find some in the valleys of Palestine, and some upon the rocks of Norway'. Johnson's

The best example is boondocks. Originally in Tagalog it signified a mountain, but, when poor natives explained that they came from mountainous areas, outsiders imagined the word was a general term for any slummy or primitive place.

example, we can hear a note of doubt in his report that the word 'porcelain' is 'said to be derived from pour cent années; because it was believed by Europeans, that the materials of porcelain was matured under ground one hundred years'. In fact it comes from the Italian word porcellana, meaning 'cowrie shell'—a diminutive derived from the Latin porcus ('pig'), as the cowrie has commonly

in fact foppery looks to have German origins, while fond, still then commonly used as a somewhat poetic equivalent for 'silly', may be from the Norse, related for instance to the modern Icelandic fáni, which means someone who emptily swaggers. Another

is possible, too, that OK has its origins in the Wolof waw kay. That said, the expression has also been claimed as Greek, Finnish, Gaelic, Choctaw and French; as an abbreviation of the faintly humorous misspelling Orl Korrect or of Obediah Kelly, the name of a freight agent who initialled documents he'd checked; and as an inversion of the boxing term KO (knock-out), used because a boxer who hadn't been knocked out was considered to be … well, OK.

Of the approximately 27,000 words identified in the OED as having first been used between 1250 and 1450, more than a fifth have French origins, and more than three-quarters of these are nouns.43 About half of all words in common use are nouns, and the introduction of new nouns – so many of them material – marks the discovery of new things, new experiences, new attitudes. Nouns

Oblonsy was fond of a pleasant joke, and sometimes liked to perplex a simple-minded man by observing that if you're going to be proud of your ancestry, why stop short at Prince Rurik and repudiate your oldest ancestor - the ape?

It all begins and ends in the same place, doesn't it? Conor and me in Ballyutogue. We all come home eventually.

No matter how far they might have strayed from their origins as they became institutionalized over time, the historical record clearly indicates that what we now call the drive for social justice was the idealistic underpinning of monotheistic faith.

intellectual trends that originate with a given person have a prehistory of their own

The more deeply language is probed, the more traces it reveals of the beings that produce it.

You must see that if two things are alike, then it is a further question whether the first is copied from the second, or the second from the first, or both from a third.

We are each born into a situation—a particular body (its race, sex, health...), a set of ancestors, a community, a nation—and born into the stories told of each of these.

Like Adam, formed from clay, children are formed from the biological material of which they are made or by the hands of their parents.

When I was 6, I learned where I came from, which was one step removed from the usual circumstances. I was adopted.

I was born and raised in southern Utah.

People presume that just because I am Shahid Kapoor's brother, I must have studied in an international school, gone out on foreign vacations, and had a certain kind of upbringing. But the truth is quite different, and I am very proud of where I come from.

Anybody who thinks the lute just came out of a vacuum doesn't know the history.

Besides Sumerian cuneiform, the other certain instance of independent origins of writing in human history comes from Native American societies of Mesoamerica, probably southern Mexico. Mesoamerican

Veddoid Negritos of Sri Lanka

WHAT CAN ARCHAEOLOGY can tell us