digitS'
Garden Master
Language has always interested me altho I'm poorly suited for it – having impaired hearing from an early age. It may have something to do with having only one book in my childhood home other than the family bible. The dictionary was always there for the most simple of research on any subject. As a young teenager, my parents bought a set of World Book encyclopedias, oh boy!
The 2 linguists in the faculty of the university where I showed up for graduate school taught me to do field work. What choice? Otherwise, there was the museologist and 2 archeologists while I was doing social anthropology?? Anyway, I was happy with the linguists. Huh
?
I was curious about a word origin the other day — Stafford. Okay, I understand the ford part. I often drive past What I understand was a commonly used ford in the river, before a bridge was built nearby, about 130 years ago. The ford is almost in view from what was my distant garden of years past.
So, what is the "staf" or "sta?" The writers of dictionaries have apparently determined that it is a landing. So, it's the landing beside the ford. Okay. Through a body of information and the odds that there are connections, etymologists have traced "ford" and "landing" back to Old English and Old French. But "sta" ..? Well, how about "stay" as for ropes etc. for holding a boat?
Perhaps I am now in the realm of conjecture, to "infer, predict, form (an opinion or notion) upon probabilities or slight evidence." Perhaps not but it was just a name I was curious about and not as clear as Clifford or Redford or Kingsford ... not something that I want to go down the rabbit hole for.
Conjecture.
The 2 linguists in the faculty of the university where I showed up for graduate school taught me to do field work. What choice? Otherwise, there was the museologist and 2 archeologists while I was doing social anthropology?? Anyway, I was happy with the linguists. Huh
?I was curious about a word origin the other day — Stafford. Okay, I understand the ford part. I often drive past What I understand was a commonly used ford in the river, before a bridge was built nearby, about 130 years ago. The ford is almost in view from what was my distant garden of years past.
So, what is the "staf" or "sta?" The writers of dictionaries have apparently determined that it is a landing. So, it's the landing beside the ford. Okay. Through a body of information and the odds that there are connections, etymologists have traced "ford" and "landing" back to Old English and Old French. But "sta" ..? Well, how about "stay" as for ropes etc. for holding a boat?
Perhaps I am now in the realm of conjecture, to "infer, predict, form (an opinion or notion) upon probabilities or slight evidence." Perhaps not but it was just a name I was curious about and not as clear as Clifford or Redford or Kingsford ... not something that I want to go down the rabbit hole for
.Conjecture.
