It's pop quiz. Ready? What is special about the following sentence?

Her husband was weak, ugly, and awkward, so she dangled him in a bag and bashed him until he died. Now if you answered that this sentence is special because of the exciting Wish fulfillment that it describes,

you need to seek help.

But there is something special and important about this sentence

that matters a lot for our journey into the past that we are now

making into the history of the English language.

And that is, in this sentence, if I'm not mistaken, every verb and noun comes from old Norse which is the language of the Vikings

this is Viking Visibility Week on young heretics we did not talk about Old Norse and its influence on English last time when I gave you my broad strokes history of the English language, but husband, weak, ugly, awkward, dangle, bag, bash, and die are all Old Norse words.

And Old Norse is a Germanic language.

It's a stage in the evolution of the Germanic languages as they become

Scandinavian because that's what the Vikings were. They were Scandinavian,

Marauders, journeymen, invaders, however you want to describe them. And England is one of the places they

invaded in, for example, the late 700s and so on, and the words that they brought to England made their way into certainly modern

English, definitely middle English, they show up a lot in middle English, but probably they also made their way into old English, although

we don't have as many texts in old English that demonstrate the adoption of these words

into old English, but they probably entered into the vocabulary into the language

and then gradually made their way into the written text because it's not as if these words are

very likely to show up on official documentation. They clearly come from a context of invasion. They come from

people coming in, Vikings coming and raping and pillaging and leaving behind their

language to describe all the nasty bad things they were doing, all the nasty

ways they regarded the English.

And sometimes it's not that there were only conflicts between the Vikings and the English.

...