{"id":12642,"date":"2009-12-28T12:22:27","date_gmt":"2009-12-28T20:22:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/neology\/2009\/12\/28\/three-pirate-lasses.html"},"modified":"2009-12-28T12:22:27","modified_gmt":"2009-12-28T20:22:27","slug":"three-pirate-lasses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2009\/12\/28\/three-pirate-lasses\/","title":{"rendered":"Three pirate lasses"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>It occurred to me recently to wonder about the derivation of the word \"cutlass.\"<\/p>\n<p>Turns out it's from Middle French \"coutel,\" meaning knife, which ultimately derives from Latin \"culter,\" meaning knife or plowshare. (! Had no idea that one word meant both things.)<\/p>\n<p>And the \"lass\" part appears to be a Middle French augmentative suffix. So I gather that the Middle French \"coutelas\" basically meant \"big knife.\"<\/p>\n<p>Which made me wonder about another piratical term: \"windlass.\" Which turns out to derive from Norse \"vind&#257;ss,\" in which the \"&amp;#257ss\" part means \"pole.\" So it's a winding-pole.<\/p>\n<p>Kind of neat that the two lasses are etymologically distinct from each other as well as from the word \"lass.\"<\/p>\n<p>As well as, of course, from that third pirate-related lass, the spyglass.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It occurred to me recently to wonder about the derivation of the word &#8220;cutlass.&#8221; Turns out it&#8217;s from Middle French &#8220;coutel,&#8221; meaning knife, which ultimately derives from Latin &#8220;culter,&#8221; meaning&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,83],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-etymology","category-specific-words"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12642"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12642\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}