After an extended series of midmorning snacks by the girls — apples and peanut butter, olive bread with butter, and I'm not really sure what else — Evelin made the comment that with all that noshing they'd probably wouldn't want lunch.
A little time passes, then Celeste pipes up: "Is nosh spelled with an n or a g?"
I told her it was with an "n", explaining that it came from Yiddish, which lead to a bit of investigation to figure out that it would be written נָאשׁ, if we were using the Hebrew alphabet.
I also made a mistake in telling her that the word came to English via German, which was completely wrong. It actually comes from New Latin gnomus via French. Probably it was coined from the Greek γηνωμη ("earth-dweller"), but γνωσις ("knowledge") is also suggested.
2 comments:
did you admit the error of your answer?
And Happy New Year to you, too! Thanks for the gift wrap translation!
I tried to tell her the error, but she'd moved on to something else and didn't care anymore ... fickle attention span of a five-year-old and all ...
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