Library/Bookstore

Recently, I was thinking about the French words bibliothèque (library) and librairie (bookstore).  Both are related to words that mean book:  the Greek βιβλίο and the Latin liber.  (The Italian biblioteca and libraria are comparable.)  The same situation also exists in English with library and bookstore:  library comes from the Latin liber, and bookstore contains bōc, the Anglo-Saxon or Old English word for book.

Everything is shifted over a language, but the same relationships exist:  the word for library is related to book in an-other language, and the word for bookstore contains book in an older form of the same language.

Droid

A couple years ago, I was thinking about the word droid from Star Wars.  (I recently started re-watching Star Wars: Rebels but in French, which is probably what reminded me of this.)  The word seems to be an abbreviation of android, although this isn't made clear in the movies.  In Alan Dean Foster's Splinter of the Mind's Eye (which I believe is the first Star Wars book, aside from the novelization of the first film), the word is formatted with an apostrophe ('droid).

Android comes from the Greek άνδρας (man) and the suffix -οιδ (-like); an android is something that is man-like.  (Similarly, asteroid comes from αστέρι [star] and -οιδ.)  What I find interesting about droid is that it's an abbreviation that's not broken along the etymological seam, so to speak.

"One Hundred Percent"

A few months ago, I started re-watching Star Wars: The Clone Wars, but in order to prevent my feeling like I was just wasting my time re-watching a television show, I decided to watch the whole series with French audio (and English subtitles) with the hope of improving my French (un nouvel espoir, if you will).  Recently, I watched an episode in which a character said "One hundred percent."  In French, this is "cent pour cent," which got me thinking.

As a phrase, "cent pour cent" epitomizes the perfect completeness of 100% because cent (from the Latin centum) appears twice.  It's literally "one hundred for one hundred."  In English, however, cent is paired with hundred, which is from Old English.  It's still 100 for 100, but there's this melange of etymologies.

Adieu/Adios/Goodbye

A couple months ago, the local Radio Shack (which didn't want to hire me when I applied there last year) closed.  While driving by it recently, I noticed that the "RadioShack" sign had been blacked out in such a way that the remaining letters spell "adioS."

It made me realize that the Spanish adiós is a cognate with the French adieu.  About a year ago, I read a footnote in a literature anthology that explained that adieu means "to God."  Apparently, the full phrase is the Old French "à Dieu vos comant" (I commend you to God).  In the same way, adiós comes from a Dios.  The other Romance languages have similar words; they're all derived from the Latin ad Deum.

When I read that footnote last year, I also remembered one of the few things I learned in my linguistics class in college: goodbye comes from the phrase "God be with ye."  The phrases are sort of going in opposite directions ("I commend you to God" but "God be with you"), but they express roughly the same sentiment.  Goodbye also has the same formulation as adieu and adiós; they're all phrases condensed into a single word.