… between each fillet of rabbit, a closely-studded row of cock’s-kernels must be deeply inserted in the coating of quenelle force-meat…

My SOED gives “swollen gland” as a dialect sense of kernel, but I can’t imagine any gland on a fowl being big enough to have a culinary use. A polite term for cock’s testicles, perhaps? Anybody know?

An example is the Spanish “footing”.  It was borrowed from French, which took it from the English word meaning “position”.
In Spanish, however, it has come to mean jogging.

footing.

(Voz francesa, y esta con cambio de sentido del ingl. footing ‘posición’ ).

1. m. Paseo higiénico que se hace corriendo con velocidad moderada al aire libre.

Real Academia Española © Todos los derechos reservados

Roughly translated:  French word with a change in meaning from the English ‘footing’, meaning position.
1. masculine noun. Healthful movement [exercise] done by running outdoors at a moderate pace.

Are there other English words that have come to mean something different from the original when adopted by
another language?  Smoking, in Brazilian Portuguese, means tuxedo, but that’s not too far from its source, smoking jacket.

Viewers of “The Sopranos” were abuzz last year with the revelation that gangster Vito was gay, or a fanook. (Vito’s business associates did not take this very well, as one might expect.) But where does the work fanook come from? Finocchio is the standard Italian for “gay,” but there are regional variations. Sicilian-Americans of Blanche’s acquaintance actually say something like finoic, but perhaps finook or fanook are also found among some speakers.

Finocchio also means “fennel,” and the relationship between homosexuality and fennel is puzzling. Several theories are found on the internet. One of the most common ideas is that during the Middle Ages, homosexuals were publicly burned for their sins and that fennel was part of this execution, though theories vary on why. The Spanish-language Wikipedia claims that fennel will make the process last longer, while other sites claim that fennel will reduce the odor of the burning body. Yet other websites and blogs claim that fennel stalks were the fuel for the fire.

The problem with the “Fennel on burning bodies” theory is that there is no historical evidence that this ever happened. Homosexuals (and many, many others) were burned by the Church, but so far as Blanche can determine, no contemporary source ever documented fennel playing any role in these executions. Fennel smells good, but it is hard to see how it would be powerful enough to cover the odor of burning bodies. And if you wanted fuel, why not use wood.

The article goes on to mention a far more plausible origin for finocchio.

First, finocchio for “homosexual” is only attested from about 1863. That raises an immediate problem for the heretic-burning theory. If finocchio really originates in the Middle Ages, then why is there no record till the 19th century?

“Much more likely, according to Dall’Orto is an etymology in which finocchio as “homosexual” derives from earlier uses of the word to mean “worthless, traitorous.” Finocchio is used in this way in verses apocryphally attributed to Dante:

E quei, ch’io non credeva esser finocchi, ma veri amici, e prossimi, già sono venuti contra me con lancie, e stocchi.

[And those, who I did not believe were traitors, but true friends and very close, now were come in front of me with lances and thrusts.]

In short, the word surly is no more than an alteration of sirly, which meant lordly, haughty, imperious, acting like a sir in fact. We can follow the development in OED.

sirly, a.

Obs., rare

[f. SIR n. + -LY1. Cf. SURLY a.]

Lordly, haughty, imperious

c1350 Will. Palerne 3316 Now William..stifli forth rides, so serreli thurth the cite al him-self one, that eche weigh was a-wondred. 1570 LEVINS Manip. 100 Serly, imperiosus. 1579 SPENSER Sheph. Cal. July 203 Sike syrlye shepheards han we none, They keepen all the path. 1600 HOLLAND Livy XXXV. xxxviii. 911 Syrly lords (say they) were the Macedonians, and rigorous. 1648 J. BEAUMONT Psyche XIX. i, Thine own erected head To far more solid Wretchedness doth bow Than ever made the vilest Reptile be The foot~stool of Contempt to sirly Thee.

surly, a.

[Altered spelling of SIRLY a.]

1. Lordly, majestic Obs., rare

1566 DRANT tr. Horace, Sat. I. ii. Bjb, How he doth decke, and dighte His surlye corps in rytche aray.

2.  a. Masterful, imperious; haughty, arrogant, supercilious. Obs.

c1572 I. B. in Gascoigne Posies (1575), The sauerie sappes in Gascoignes Flowers that are,..Could not content the surly for their share, Ne cause them once to yeeld him thankes therefore. 1726 POPE Odyss. XXIII. 50 Stern as the surly lion o’er his prey.

3. a. Churlishly ill-humoured; rude and cross; ‘gloomily morose’ (J.). Said of persons (or animals), or their actions or attributes.

1670 RAY Prov. 208 As surly as a butchers dog. 1677 OTWAY Cheats of Scapin I. i, Thou art as surly as if thou really couldst do me no good. 1722 DE FOE Col. Jack (1840) 7 Captain Jack..a surly, ill-looked rough boy, had not a word in his mouth that savoured either of good manners, or good humour. 1757 SMOLLETT Reprisal I. i, Commend me to the blunt sincerity of the true surly British mastiff. 1770 GOLDSM. Des. Vill. 105 Nor surly porter stands in guilty state. 1807 CRABBE Par. Reg. III. 245 And surly beggars cursed the ever-bolted door. 1840 DICKENS Old C. Shop xvi, A surly, grumbling manner. 1865 KINGSLEY Herew. xix, A surly voice asked who was there. 1884 F. M. CRAWFORD Rom. Singer ix. I. 187 Dry throats make surly answers, as the proverb says.

Fascinating (and telling) shift in meaning!

Grey areas would be zeitgeist (spirit of the age works just as well? (and the spellchecker lets that through!)); et al (and others); sui generis (unique); &c.

Some have specific applications such as legal pro bono, philosophical a priori, a posteriori, and these have stuck after prolonged usage.

Cul de sac (dead end) and entre nous (between you and me) are unnecessary and pretentious I would say and there must be many more of these. Part of it must be that writers (or speakers) feel they are erudite and eloquent if they go for the foreign over the homegrown.

Finally, are there any English loanwords in other languages that have no equivalent as in my first para? ‘Le dirty weekend’ in French is the only, er, conceptual one I can think of.

Hope this hasn’t been covered before, possibly by me - I found it in my old notes after being reminded by the slip in in last post

Duke

PS The spell check nixes online as one word.

1448, “relating to things” (esp. property), from O.Fr. reel, from L.L. realis “actual,” from L. res “matter, thing,” of unknown origin. Real estate is first recorded 1666 and retains the oldest Eng. sense of the word;

Escapee seems unnecessary, however, as there is nothing to contrast it to. Escaper would surely be more sensible? Is it just conformity to the tradition described in the usage note which also cites absentee (and we never hear absenter). Are there any exceptions at all?

King Charles II ‘The Black Boy,’ apparently was not alone. His whole noble family was more or less black skinned. But there were also commoners who were black and coloured, and so far Mike Nassau is the only one on the web who has tackled this problem. Explaining the black presence in Europe and among the early immigrants to the USA. They were not descendents of African slaves but autochthons Europeans. Does anyone know of other book sources which explain these matters?

Egmond Codfried

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Fragment of Mike Nassau’s article:

“3. Schwarze Deutsche or Black Germans, found along the Danube River in Austria and Germany, in the Black Forest and, to a lesser extent, along the Rhine River, have dark hair and eyes, unlike the fairer people both north and south of them. Their descendants in America may be called either Black Dutch or Black German. The origin of their dark coloration is ancient, from the Roman army in the third and fourth centuries, C.E. The Roman army of this time period was mostly made up of German mercenary soldiers, but along the German border, the Romans preferred to station non-Germans. The army on the Danube was largely drawn from Numidian and Nubian soldiers, especially Garamante Numidians. The Garamante (called Tubu now) were Black Africans from the central Sahara. Now the Tubu live in northern Chad, eastern Niger and southern Libya. They are not usually found north of Marzuk in Fezzan or Kufra in Cyrenaica now, but in Roman times they ranged north to the central coast of Libya and to Ghadames in southern Tunisia. As well as Garamante, there were some Iranic people stationed on this frontier, especially Sarmatians (called Ossets now) and Scythians (Ashkenazi in the Hebrew Bible) from southern Russia and the Ukraine (Ashkenaz, the old Hebrew for Scythia, has been used for Germany in modern Hebrew by Ashkenazic Jews trying to ingratiate themselves with Germans and Austrians or trying to hide their Khazar ancestry). These African and Iranic soldiers left many descendants who tend to have black, heavy hair and dark eyes even yet.
Beethoven and Hitler are two famous examples of this group (Peanuts). It is interesting to imagine Hitler’s reaction to someone telling him he probably got his heavy, black hair from Black African ancestry. Since this was so long ago, with population movement and inter-marriage, all Europeans must have some ancestry from these Black African soldiers. In sixty generations, a person could leave 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 descendants with just two children per person each generation so long as no descendants married each other. Obviously, after a time, many descendants will marry each other, but still it works out statistically that most people from that long ago who left descendants at all are ancestors of everyone in Europe today. The tendency for people to stay in their own community explains why we can see the effects along the Danube and in the Black Forest in the people with black hair and dark eyes but do not see it far away like Iceland. The concentration is far greater at the point of origin, but the dispersion radiates out to everywhere given enough time.”

SOURCE: http://www.blackdutch1.webs.com/