Unexpected #Etymology

Words you wouldn't guess are etymologically linked.

An ongoing, continually updated thread 👇🏻

Medicine and remedy both come from the Latin verb medeor, meaning to heal.

Medicine comes from the Old French medecine, from the Latin medicina meaning medicine.

Remedy comes from the Old French remede, from the Latin remedium.

https://t.co/09BQ4avjOo
Feminism, fawn and fetus both come from the PIE root *dʰeh₁(y)-, meaning to nurse or suckle.

https://t.co/POZwnKbSom
Pine (tree) & Piñata (papier-mâché container) both come from the Latin pinus—meaning pine.

Piñata (Spanish), came from piña meaning pineapple, as the paper-covered box resembles one. Piña comes from the Latin pinea meaning pinecone (derived from pinus).

https://t.co/L8LGcb4NcC
Whiskey and wash both come from the Proto-Indo-Euro root meaning "water; wet."

Whiskey (Irish uisce beatha & Scottish uisge-beatha) literally means "water of life."

Wash cames from the Middle English weschen, meaning "to wash."

https://t.co/GflKmpx8gD

https://t.co/W86lE76jIg
Text and textile both come from the Latin texo, meaning to weave.

Textile: borrowed from Latin textile (“woven”), from texō (“weave”).

Text: Medieval Latin textus (“the Scriptures, text, treatise”), from Latin textus (“style or texture of a work”)

https://t.co/mATf45QsD3
Rat and erode both come from the PIE root *reh₁d-, meaning to scrape, scratch or gnaw.

https://t.co/XQy0Rl37UM

More from Education

An appallingly tardy response to such an important element of reading - apologies. The growing recognition of fluency as the crucial developmental area for primary education is certainly encouraging helping us move away from the obsession with reading comprehension tests.


It is, as you suggest, a nuanced pedagogy with the tripartite algorithm of rate, accuracy and prosody at times conflating the landscape and often leading to an educational shrug of the shoulders, a convenient abdication of responsibility and a return to comprehension 'skills'.

Taking each element separately (but not hierarchically) may be helpful but always remembering that for fluency they occur simultaneously (not dissimilar to sentence structure, text structure and rhetoric in fluent writing).

Rate, or words-read-per-minute, is the easiest. Faster reading speeds are EVIDENCE of fluency development but attempting to 'teach' children(or anyone) to read faster is fallacious (Carver, 1985) and will result in processing deficit which in young readers will be catastrophic.

Reading rate is dependent upon eye-movements and cognitive processing development along with orthographic development (more on this later).

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