quword 趣词
Word Origins Dictionary
- filibuster
- filibuster: [16] Filibuster and freebooter [16] are doublets: that is to say, they come from the same ultimate source, but have subsequently diverged. Freebooter ‘pirate’ was borrowed from Dutch vrijbuiter, a compound formed from vrij ‘free’ and buiter ‘plunderer’ (this was a derivative of buit ‘loot’, to which English booty is related).
But English was not the only language to adopt it; French wanted it too, but mangled it somewhat in the borrowing, to flibustier. It was then handed on to Spanish, as filibustero. It is not clear where the 16th-century English use of the word with an l spelling rather than an r spelling (which is recorded in only one text) comes from. The French form flibustier was borrowed towards the end of the 18th century, and presentday filibuster came from the Spanish form in the mid-19th century.
The use of the term for ‘obstructing a legislature with an overlong speech’ (which has now virtually obliterated its former semantic equivalence to freebooter) originated in the USA in the 1880s.
=> booty, free, freebooter - football (n.)
- open-air game involving kicking a ball, c. 1400; in reference to the inflated ball used in the game, mid-14c. ("Ãe heued fro þe body went, Als it were a foteballe," Octavian I manuscript, c. 1350), from foot (n.) + ball (n.1). Forbidden in a Scottish statute of 1424. One of Shakespeare's insults is "you base foot-ball player" [Lear I.iv]. Ball-kicking games date back to the Roman legions, at least, but the sport seems first to have risen to a national obsession in England, c. 1630. Figurative sense of "something idly kicked around, something subject to hard use and many vicissitudes" is by 1530s.
Rules of the game first regularized at Cambridge, 1848; soccer (q.v.) split off in 1863. The U.S. style (known to some in England as "stop-start rugby with padding") evolved gradually 19c.; the first true collegiate game is considered to have been played Nov. 6, 1869, between Princeton and Rutgers, at Rutgers, but the rules there were more like soccer. A rematch at Princeton Nov. 13, with the home team's rules, was true U.S. football. Both were described as foot-ball at Princeton.
Then twenty-five of the best players in college were sent up to Brunswick to combat with the Rutgers boys. Their peculiar way of playing this game proved to Princeton an insurmountable difficulty; .... Two weeks later Rutgers sent down the same twenty-five, and on the Princeton grounds, November 13th, Nassau played her game; the result was joyous, and entirely obliterated the stigma of the previous defeat. ["Typical Forms of '71" by the Princeton University Class of '72, 1869]
- obliterate (v.)
- c. 1600, from Latin obliteratus, past participle of obliterare "cause to disappear, blot out, erase, efface," figuratively "cause to be forgotten," from ob "against" (see ob-) + littera (also litera) "letter, script" (see letter (n.)); abstracted from phrase literas scribere "write across letters, strike out letters." Related: Obliterated; obliterating.