Heavy Metal

Life is so much easier when I can steal my subject matter from someone else's blog.

If you're not reading I Blame The Patriarchy, well, you should be. It's hilarious, and as you can see in today's posting, she hates the misuse of the word "enormity" as much as I do, and that's reason enough to love her. (For those not in the know, it has nothing to do with the size of anything, and everything to do with the monstrous or inordinately evil nature of something. Yes, it's derived from the same word, but by centuries of use it's taken on this meaning, and misusing it can lead to serious misunderstanding.)

One of the words in this same posting was "farrier", and though I knew what it meant--someone who shoes horses--I couldn't figure out its provenance. Nothing I could think of led me to "someone who shoes horses". The clue turns out, of course, to be the most obvious thing, the thing I didn't, inexplicably, consider; the vowel. "Farrier" is from Latin "ferrum", "iron", from which horseshoes are made.