2020-11-25
18 分钟Coming up on Word Matters, letters from you.
I'm Emily Brewster,
and Word Matters is produced by Merriam-Webster in collaboration with New England Public Media.
On each episode, Merriam-Webster editors Neil Servin, Amon Shea, Peter Sokolowski,
and I explore some aspect of the English language from the dictionary's vantage point.
Today's episode is made possible by listeners like you.
On each episode, we ask anyone with a language-related question, complaint,
or straight-up grudge to write to us at wordmatters.m-w.com.
Today, we're going to spend some time with a few of the notes that have come in recently.
Listener Richard Hastings wrote to us with the following,
I first noticed the misapplication of lightning when the meteorological phenomenon of lightning was clearly intended.
I first noticed this in my local newspaper,
and attributed the use to poorly educated writer or editor.
Within a few weeks, however, I saw the same use at least twice more.
This is fascinating to me because in Middle English,
Lighttening and lightning were both used for the flashes of light.
The words are essentially mere spelling variants.
They both come from the gerund of lighttenen, this is a middle English word,
L-I-G-H-T-E-N-E-N, meaning to lighten.
And the two words kind of went in different directions with the one without the E,