Lanuage Lesson for Today

While thumbing through the dictionary yesterday, I came across a silly word that made me smile.

horripilation - the bristling of the body hair, as from fear or cold; goose flesh. It comes from the Latin horripilatus.

Wow, goose bumps actually have a "formal" name with Latin roots (an old language not dark Spanish hair). It's kind of funny if you think about it because it's the tightening of the surrounding muscles that cause the roots of our body hair to stand on end. (Get it, Latin roots, body hair roots.)

Let's run with this. Is that why horror movies give us horripilation or does horripilation give us horror movies? Maybe that's where horror movies got their moniker.

Horripliation makes me think of depilation ~ the act of removing hair from the body. Hey, that word has a Latin root, too, which is depilare (completely deprive) and pilus (hair). So are horror movies the reason I need to get a dreaded lip wax every two weeks? Funny, I don't watch horror movies.

I don't know, this is starting to sound more French than Latin. French is a romance language with Latin roots (there we go with the roots thing again) but I digress.

So class, this is our language lesson for today. You can't say that you don't learn nothing from reading my blog. (ha! ha!)

note from the blogmeister: Whew, I had to change this blog's wallpaper! All those red flowers were causing my brain to spin.