This is the illusionist in which I, Helen Zoltzman, hold language up to the light to check

its legit.

Coming up are some of your opinions about the use of pleas in response to the last episode

about differences in how the word is deployed in the US versus the UK.

And before that, continents.

I can now reveal that continent, the land mass kind and continent, the blood of control

kind.

It has to arrive from the same Latin verb.

Contenery to hold together.

I expect you can infer how that applies to continent as in the control of the bodily

evacuations.

And continent has been used in that sense since the 19th century, but it had entered the

English language by a French quite a while earlier, around the 14th century.

And during the intervening time, it was more about self-restraint, particularly raining

in sexual urges.

And I still like to describe my stoical family as emotionally continent.

The land mass meaning of continent arrived in English a little later in the mid 16th

century.

Nothing to do with holding in your emotions or effluent except for that mutual root word

continent which appeared in the Latin term, terror continents.

Land held together, a continuous land.

And this is where the modern day definition of continent runs into a bit of a mess.

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