Most of the snow is gone, as expected, though pockets remain in shady spots. Temps are supposed to be as high as 60 F over the weekend, though, and that’ll return us completely to November brown.

Books are being re-arranged downstairs in a major way, and today I opened my copy of The American Language (Fourth Edition, 1936) at random, which is a good way to approach that work. Picked at random, page 211:

“The majority of the numerous Spanish loan-words in American came in before the Civil War, but the Spanish-American War added insurrecto, trocha, junta, ladrone, incommunicado, ley fuga, machete, mañana, and rurale, some of which are already obsolete; and the popularity of Western movies and fiction has brought in a few more, e.g., rodeo, hoosegow (from juzgado, the past participle of juzgar, to judge) and wrangler (from caballerango, a horse-groom), and greatly increased the use of others,” Mencken writes. “Chile con carne did not enter into the general American dietary until after 1900. The suffix –ista came in during the troubles in Mexico, following the downfall of Porfirio Díaz in 1911.”

Barista, in fact, is borrowed from Italian, but fashionista is patterned after Sandinista. Mencken wasn’t referring to that, however, and he doesn’t say what -ista word he’s thinking of from the 1910s, rather than the 1980s, when (I think) fashionista was coined, as Clintonista was in the 1990s.

One more language-related item. I didn’t know that some Germans were so touchy about Anglicisms in German. Golly, you’d think they were French.