Well, thanks to be to God, we have now reached a point on our journey through the English language

where it's time use a drink.

It's Friday.

We are continuing our journey which has been such a blast backwards

through the history of the English language. If you haven't seen the other

episodes you might now want to go back two weeks and catch up to where I've been talking about the history of English generally and also how you can read some of the great works of English literature without becoming totally ensnared in a lifelong

study of the various different forms of English.

We have this weird situation in English where the

literature of our past is written in literally different languages that old

English and middle English are distinctive enough from the English that we speak now in America and in the

UK to count as foreign languages and to need translations and I've been recommending editions

and facing page translations as we go of things like

Galwayne and the Green Night and in a future episode we'll be talking about Beowulf and all that stuff.

So if you haven't yet, maybe go catch up on those episodes. It's been one of my

favorite series to do. But I didn't really I have I have no particular place where I needed to put this but I know we have to talk about it

so I'm just going to talk about it now because there's no natural point necessarily to introduce

this. I would like to tell you about the etymology of the

word whiskey. So even if you can't yet be having a glass of the Macallin or

Lagavulin or Lagoel and or Lefroyg while you're listening to me if it's not five

o'clock that's fine we're going to have an

etymological dram right now as we talk about the etymology of the word

whiskey because it illustrates perfectly the wild and crazy grab bag that is the English language.

...