CacologyĬacology literally means “evil-speaking,” and is used to refer to a poor choice of words or noticeably bad language. Something that is cachinnatory, incidentally, makes you cachinnate. Cachinnateĭerived from Latin, cachinnation is loud or raucous laughter, and to cachinnate is to laugh loudly or immoderately. It literally means “fire-pooper” in Spanish. Cacafuegoīorrowed into English in the 1600s, a cacafuego or cacafugo is a blustering, swaggering boaster. Should you ever need to, you can also use cabby-labby as a verb, meaning “to argue” or “to disagree.” 2. Cabby-LabbyĪlso called a cabby-lab, cabby-labby is an old Scots dialect word for a noisy quarrel or disagreement in which everyone involved is speaking at the same time. This all means that C isn’t used as much today as it was in Old English, but you can still expect it to account for around 2.5 percent of a page of written English, and it accounts for 3.5 percent of all the words in a dictionary-including the 40 clever C-words collected and collated here. Ultimately, C typically came to be used in all the “s”-sounding words (known as “soft-C”), while the Greek K was rescued from the linguistic scrapheap and began to be used for the “hard-C” words. Old English speakers were now facing the same problem that the Romans had had, as their letter C was being used for two entirely different sounds. After the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, the English language adopted a number of words from French in which the Latin letter C was now being used to represent a “s” sound, like city, citizen, and circle.
Just as things were starting to settle down, along came William the Conqueror. So when the Roman alphabet was introduced to England, C was originally used for all instances of the “k” sound-as in cyng (Old English “king”), sticca (“stick”), lician (“like”), cneow (“knee”), and cniht (“knight”).
Having one letter to represent multiple sounds proved confusing, and so Roman scribes invented a new letter, G, to represent “g,” which freed C to represent the “k” sound. The letter C is a modern-day descendent of the Ancient Greek letter gamma, and as such originally represented a “g” sound rather than “k.” The Romans, however, confused everything they typically used their letter C to represent both “g” and “k” sounds, avoiding the letter K (which was descended from the Greek kappa) almost entirely.
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