Beware of linguistic false friends, also known as false cognates. You wouldn’t want to say you’re feeling embarazada in Spanish, unless you want to say you’re pregnant. And don’t order the tuna in Spain unless you want to hear a musical group made up of college kids. A kind of false friend exists within English as well: noisome doesn’t mean “noisy,” it means “icky,” and bombastic doesn’t mean “booming,” it means “fluffy” or “ostentatious,” deriving from bombast, a kind of cotton padding. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “False Friends”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, especially if you’re talking about foreign languages.
Grant, I know you’ve had this experience where you’re tripped up by what linguists call false friends.
Faux amis.
Right. You think, for example, that you order tuna off a menu in a Spanish-speaking country.
That’s a mistake if you ask for tuna because tuna is either a prickly pear cactus fruit or a musical group of university students.
Yeah, and there’s the classic embarazada, you know, which means pregnant rather than embarrassed.
I’ve made that mistake myself, the embarrassed part.
But, you know, it occurs to me that we have some false friends in English as well.
You know, English words that look like they mean something when really they don’t.
And one of the ones that I’ve run across several times recently has been the word bombastic.
You know, people think that bombastic refers to language that’s thunderous or violent.
I mean, you know, you can hear the word bomb in the word bombastic.
But the truth is that it comes from an old word that means cotton padding, you know, that you would pad something with.
And so if your writing is bombastic, it’s sort of characterized by, you know, fluff.
Wordiness and lots of useless turns of phrase.
Yeah, airy, ostentatious kind of writing.
It goes all the way back to a Greek word for silkworm, actually.
And another one that tripped me up for a long time, in fact, sometimes it still does, is innervate.
Ooh, what does that mean?
To take the nerves out of something?
Yes, very good.
Most people think it means to invigorate, but the truth is that that’s exactly it.
It goes back to an old Latin word for sinew.
And so if you take the sinews out of somebody, you’ve sort of left them sort of muscle-less.
Well, I’m thinking of a whole bunch more of these.
Yeah.
Enormity is a big one.
Oh, enormity.
People think it means very enormous, but it actually means horrible or terrible.
Yeah, yeah.
It has to do with being out of the norm, literally.
Although that word really seems to be going through a big change.
It may have already jumped the shark, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
And then noisome is another one.
Noisome, yes.
People think it means very noisy, but it doesn’t.
Right.
It’s a relative of nausea.
It’s just icky.
Yeah.
English has got traps and pitfalls everywhere you go.
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