Salientia Stuff

Winkelwagen

What's Your Angle?

This week's word is the Dutch winkelwagen: winkel means shop or store, wagen means cart or car, and together they form a shopping cart. I found the sound of the word amusing and wanted to feature it for that reason alone.

I was just going to leave it at that when I began to wonder about the word winkel: The Ducth word for shop didn't seem to match any word for shop that I knew in other languages. To be fair, unlike the word market (Dutch: markt; German: Markt; French: marché; Spanish: mercado), the words for shop or store seem to vary a lot by language (German: Geschäft, Laden; French: magazin, boutique; Spanish: tienda).

Digging deeper, I learned that winkel once meant corner. Had I done any mathematics in German, I might have known that Winkel is the German word for angle. Anyways, it seems that corner turned into corner store, then into store and lost its original meaning of corner (hoek in modern Dutch).

Periwinkle Periwinkles

Winkel shares a common root with the English words winch and wink. These words also share a common root with one type of periwinkle, but not with its homonym. We can split periwinkles into two categories: in one category is a type of snail and in the other is a type of flower along with a color matching that of the flower. The snail is related to winking, but the flower is not.

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