- Listen on:
- Apple
- Spotify
- iHeart Radio
- »
After our conversation about towns with extremely short names, many listeners wrote to tell us about Why, Arizona. Others pointed out that there are towns called Ely in Iowa, Minnesota, and Nevada. Other super-short appellations include Rye, New...
Debbie from Crawfordsville, Florida, says that when she and her husband reach an impasse while working on something, they’ll say Let’s grok about it, which they use to mean “Let’s think about it.” Grok was coined by...
I wonder if ‘undertaker’ is a calque from Dutch, the other way around, or borrowed from a whole different language! In Dutch the word ‘ondernemer’ is still used in the broad sense of owning a business. As such, a common mistake for Dutch people to make in English, is to refer to themself as an undertaker, when they mean entrepreneur.
I was surprised you didn’t mention all the other instances in English where ‘undertake’ is still used in its older, broader sense, though specific in its own way. For example ‘undertaking’ to mean a big job or task. Or indeed the verb ‘to undertake’: to embark on a big job. And in reading a dictionary entry at https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/undertake I realize it can even mean ‘to make a promise’ and ‘to take responsibility for something’, though I’ve not come across those organically, yet.