Daniel in Wilmington, North Carolina, notes that in English, we literally break the fast in the morning, the source of the English word breakfast. In the same way, the Spanish word for “breakfast,” desayuno, comes from desayunar, meaning...
Jejune, meaning insipid or superficial, comes from Latin jejunus, meaning empty. The same root gives us jejunum, the part of the small intestine that is usually empty when autopsied. The same idea of emptiness is reflected in the related French and...