Welcome

My name is David Burrows and I am a freelance translator of Spanish into English. This blog contains some of my favourite words, a (mostly) amusing explanation of said words as well as some of my musings about translation. I hope you enjoy it.

Monday, 12 April 2010

Blatant

Adjective. open and unashamed; flagrant.
Origin: first used by the poet Edmund Spencer in blatant beast to describe a thousand-tongued monster, then in the sense 'clamorous': perhaps from the Scots blatand - 'bleating'.
Blatant? Blatantly.

Wow, what an origin for what seemed like a fairly simple word: poets, thousand-tongued monsters, Scots and two great words in the dictionary entry: flagrant and clamorous. I picked this word for its sound, especially when said with extra emphasis on the L (this gives it extra 'in your face, fool' effect), and got a treat in the definition. It's not a particularly high-brow word (Sherlock Holmes never said "Blatantly, my dear Watson", for example), it is easy to spell and it is easy to use but it is still great. And you never know when the simplest of things can hide interesting and complex origins.

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