Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

Here's a delightful series of ten one-minute YouTubes purporting to summarize the history of the English language. It's funny and very entertaining, if perhaps not 100% accurate. A friend on another forum added these comments:

They obviously don't know any Greek. "Martyr" is the Greek word for "witness" and is in no wise Latin other than as a borrowing. And "cardiac" and the like weren't just made up words, but were also Greek or derivations thereof.

Cars have had firewalls for as long as I can remember, and I go back a good ways before 1990, as do cars. I don't know how long firewalls in buildings were so named. I must have been about 10 when my grandfather was showing me around a building for which was the contractor and he pointed out the firewall.

The King James Bible helped standardize the language (as the Qur'an and Luther's Bible did for Arabic and German) as well as giving us figures of speech. Some expressions even came from misprints in KJB editions.