💜 MONDAY MUSINGS: WHERE DOES THE WORD "BAFFLE" COME FROM 💜
Welcome to a new series by moi, Princess of All Mew Mews. When you have a curious mind like I do, you are constantly plagued by strange thoughts... Like, why do mosquitoes exist? What is their purpose in our ecosystem?
So, I decided to start this curious little series and share tidbits of info I come across.
WHERE DOES THE WORD "BAFFLE" COME FROM???
The English language is a funny thing. Often I will be speaking or explaining something, and I will use a word that I haven't used for a long time, and it will completely baffle me. (See what I did there?)
I am a complete word nerd, and something I love doing is investigating the etymology (the origin and history of a word). I love to see how it developed from point A to point B, and find it fascinating to know the root of a word.
SO, let's start with the history. Where does the word actually originate?
The Online Etymology Dictionary says that it originates from 15th century Scottish "bauchle", meaning "to disgrace publicly", and possibly has ties to the 16th century French word "bafouer", which means to "to abuse" or "to hoodwink."
I would imagine that "hoodwink" can be related to "fool" or "trick", which in turn can be related to "confuse". "Confuse = baffle" - TADA!
While doing research for this post, I found some fun synonyms (words that have the same meaning) as baffle:
💜Perplex
💜Dumbfound
💜Befuddle 😆
💜Nonplus
💜Buffalo ??? 🤨
💜Stump
💜Mystify (I love this word!)
Do you have something that you're itching to know? Let me know and I will do some research and put a post together for you
Your thoughts matter to me. I upvote each and every well thought out comment that graces my post. To encourage dialogue and interaction. 💜
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No time to dumbfound, if a buffalo approaches thee, find the first tree with a good stump - word games for fun.
hehe! oh dear, joan, I must say I don't follow 🤪
Still Baffled 😊
Buffalo also has me confused ;)
I'm so glad that I'm not the only one with a curious mind here, poor granny Google's constantly being pestered by my curiosity on all kinds of stuff, but when a girl needs to know she needs to know not so!
One thing that always puzzles me, is how pronunciation of a language vary from region to region? That could make an interesting post?
Thank you so very much for your kind shoutout, really appreciate the support ;)
ah that is suchhhhh a great idea! I am going to do some research on that one, Lizelle! Thank you for the suggestion x
PS poor granny Google lol
That will be an interesting post! Yep granny Google's brain is always being picked LOL
Baffle is a word I use every now and again but I never knew much about it
what confused me even more is how Buffalo came up that baffled me lOL
I get baffled when using a common and everyday type of word...only to find that one day it suddenly feels strange and foreign. Looking up the definition becomes this sort of eerie experience. There must be a word for that? :D
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Have you seen the sentence composed only of the word buffalo? It goes like this:
Let me know when you make sense of it. It is a complete and grammatically correct sentence. :-D
My son might tell you this "related to waffle. Lol".
And you love purple? I know I am asking out of the context. But still ask...
The thought of turning animals into verbs has me buffaloed! How many more can there be???
Around here, we often use the more or less home made word "confuzzled." Doesn't seem to be all that home made, but I'm not convinced it's a real word.
Cool idea for a series, though!
hehehe! I also say confuzzled 😁 It's a fine word!
Thank you!
I love words too. One of my favorite podcasts is A Way with Words - they dive into word history all the time :)
It baffles me that so few people use this word. I love it. I was going to say that I thought it unlikely that the etymology included the Scottish origin and more likely to be the French, so I checked with the Oxford online dictionary.
BOOM!
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/baffle
I am also a word nerd and etymologies fascinate me and particularly when languages morph into each other to form dialects as they do in South Africa.
Look forward to more of these @princessmewmew
BTW you have voted for #powerhousecreatives to win that 100k delegation, right?