Today's Word "Epigram"
Published in Vocabulary
epigram \E-peh-graem\ (noun) - A short poem or poetic line ending on a witty thought.
"Use epigrams the way the masters used them. Samuel Taylor Coleridge once wrote: 'Swans sing before they die 'twere no bad thing/should certain people die before they sing!'"
From Old French "epigramme," from Latin "epigramma" based on Greek epigraphein "to write on, inscribe" comprising epi- "on" + graphein "to write." The source of Greek "graph-" is Proto-Indo-European gerbh- "scratch" which turns up in Old English ceorfan "to cut" which devolved into modern "carve." Kerf "width of a cut" comes from a relative, Old English cyrf "a cutting." Old Germanic krabbiz "crab"another scratcherwas borrowed by Old French as "crevis" (Modern French "crevisse"). Middle English then borrowed the Middle French term back but by folk etymology soon converted it into "crayfish," since "fish" is a familiar English word and "-vis" is not. That left the initial "cre" unrelated to any English word. Well, folks in Louisiana noticed that this fish distinguishes itself by crawling, so they applied folk etymology again to produce "craw(l)fish"a long crawl from "epigram," but a lexical relative all the same.
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