bootless
The "sootless" thread made me think of this word -- which I seen nowhere but in Shakespeare ("And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries"). Shakespeare it seems was very fond of the word. Any idea...
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No. It derives from a quite different Old English noun "bot" meaning "advantage, profit, avail, use". It crops up also in the phrase "to boot" meaning "in addition, into the bargain".The related (now...
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Nothing to do with the footwear boot, Jim. This one is cognate with better.Etymology Online gives:"profit, use" (in phrase to boot), O.E. bot, from P.Gmc. *boto (see better).I'd say it was still alive...
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And on a lower poetic plane, there's this stanza from William Cowper's "John Gilpin" (or, to be technically accurate, "The Diverting History Of John Gilpin; Showing How He Went Farther Than He...
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Thanks! I hadn't thought of the relationship with the usage "to boot" -- which is still common. I love old words like this. It makes language like an archaeological dig.
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Bertie Wooster was always very fond of things being bootless. Nice to hear the explanation. Thanks.
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The pirate's "booty" sounds related but according to the OED it derives from French and ultimately from common Germanic. (German Beute and Dutch buit) However, "booty" and "boot" have been confused by...
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I wondered if it's related to 'booty'. The OED says you might think so, but 'booty' probably comes from a cognate of German & French words meaning 'exchange, barter'. I'm abbreviating, of...
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I'm going off the old OED as well. But others have access to the online version.Happy 6/6/6, y'all!
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This is the funniest 666 factoid I've seen recently."We've gotten several emails asking, is www. (the www. for internet addresses) really 666 in Hebrew? Could it be 666: The Mark of the Beast?"From...
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Old thread on to boot. Edit: Afrikaans also uses "boete" meaning fine, penalty.Where does "bot" as in computer jargon come from?
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Bot is short for robot. See the Jargon File.Note that bots in all senses were robots when the terms first appeared in the early 1990s, but the shortened form is now habitual.
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And the origin of robot, which I know most of you are well aware of...ORIGIN from Czech, from robota forced labor. The term was coined in K. Capek's play R.U.R. Rossum's Universal Robots (1920).
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