Monday, 28 November 2016

Spot the Frippet: bottle.

No, no, people have told me all my life: you don't search for a needle in a bundle of hay; you search for it in a bottle of hay.

Really? Personally, I search for a needle in a needle case. Still, never mind, if that's what people want to do...

Anyway, bottle. An easy spot, this one, especially when you consider that in Britain bottle means courage, in Australia to be full bottle is to be knowledgeably enthusiastic, and that more or less everywhere to be on the bottle means to be habitually drinking alcohol in an uncontrolled way.

Then there are bottle banks where you recycle old bottles, bottle brushes, bottle gourds

Courge encore verte.jpg

bottlenoses:

File:Bottlenose dolphin with young.JPG
photo by Peter Aspreyhttp://www.peter-asprey.com/

bottlers (in Australia and New Zealand anything or anyone excellent or outstanding), bottle trees:



and bottle washers (which are people in such menial positions that they might be required to wash the yes, bottles).

A magnetic bottle is a way of containing plasma using magnetic fields, and a bottleneck is a similar sort of thing, only using badly adjusted traffic lights instead of magnets.

And then, of course, there's all the bottles...

File:Coke bottles with names.jpg
photo by Doorknob747

Spot the frippet: bottle. The container word comes from the Old French botaille from the charming Latin word butticula, a small cask. The bottle-of-hay word is also from an Old French word, botel, from botte, which means bundle.




No comments:

Post a Comment

All comments are very welcome, but please make them suitable for The Word Den's family audience.