nandomando
[ID: youtube comment from Hal Sawyer:
My favorite relic English still used everywhere is the word "the" used in phrases like: "the more I look at this, the stranger it seems, or "the bigger they come, the harder they fall". This "the" is not the article of any noun, it is a different word, a conjunction descended from the old English "þā", pronounced "tha" which means either "when" or "then". Back in early Middle English the structure "if - then" had not taken over and if you wanted to express an if - then relationship you said "þā whatever, þā whatever", meaning "when such-and- such, then such-and-such". "þā" sounds almost the same as "the" and the spelling of the two converged, but the meaning remained totally different. "the more, the merrier" literally means "when more, then merrier" or "if more, then merrier'; same as centuries ago.
end ID]
this is so cool
now with added wiktionary link
update: please reblog this reblog which has a correction to this, it's from þȳ not þā and is a different grammatical form, more like "this much x means this much y"
A mated pair of House finches spend a warm autumn day frolicking from branch-to-branch.
special selection of screenshots from when my friends and i watched spongebob on some TOTALLY LEGAL site and the captions were from the wrong episodes for some reason
