Amuse-bouche:

“Giant squid” in Irish directly translates to “big mother of suck.”

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Today’s Wonderful Word: “Hobson-Jobson.” 

Definition: the alteration of a word or phrase borrowed from another language to accord more closely with the phonological and lexical patterns of the borrowing language.

Etymology: Hobson-Jobson comes from the Arabic lament ḥasan ḥusayn. British soldiers stationed in South Asia mistakenly wrote the Arabic phrase down as Hossy Gossy or Hossein Jossen. Eventually, the spelling Hobson-Jobson won out, after Hobson and Jobson, two clown characters in Victorian literature. Henry Yule and Arthur Coke Burrell coined Hobson-Jobson for the name of their glossary of Anglo-Indian words in 1886.

Examples: English “buckaroo” and “cockroach” are the results of Hobson-Jobson, coming from Spanish “vaquero” and “cucaracha.”

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I’d like to dwell neither on today’s amuse-bouche nor on the Wonderful Word, though I want to talk more about them. Unfortunately, they’re both a bit odd and make me feel uncomfortable when I talk about them. And maybe that’s all I wanted to say about them.

At least I can be grateful for the fact that we commonly use the words “giant squid” to name a giant squid as opposed to the Irish Hobson-Jobson for giant squid. That could be problematic.

You can find some other interesting terms for sea creatures here. This site informs us of a slightly different (but no better) translation of the Irish term for giant squid. Suckmother. Yikes. 

Answer to Saturday’s riddle:

Explanation: You can take the sums of the row/column intersection and start with the lowest (14+15). That’s where you put the one. The next highest sum is 14+31, so you put the 2 there. This could also be done in reverse order, starting with 46+52, placing the 16 in that space and going in decreasing order.