Thing To Do Today: minish something.

 Well we all know the word diminish: diminishing the food provided at breakfast time is one of the first things most of us do every day. 

A musician can play a diminished chord by lowering the second and third notes of an arpeggio* very slightly, and then playing all the notes at once.

But what about minish?

Well, di- at the beginning of a word (in some words it's written dia-) can mean two, or twice (as in carbon dioxide) or it can mean through, throughout, during, or even at right angles or in opposite directions.

So where does that leave us?

In a far more complicated place than we need to be, quite honestly.

Thing To Do Today: minish something. Minish comes from a Latin word minutiare, meaning to lessen. 

It's actually the word diminish that's got itself tangled up in history. There's another Latin word, dēminuare, which also means to lessen, and the word diminish is a mix-up of that and minish. 

*An arpeggio is a particular tune that forms a really common part of lots of other tunes. One example of the tune called an arpeggio is found in the first four notes of Morning Has Broken.