Chrysti The Wordsmith: Thrill - 2

Greetings and welcome to Christie the wordsmith. Last time on this series we traced the history of the verb thrill which today means to excite or fill with pleasure but thrill meant something different to our English speaking predecessors in the 14 hundreds in that century to thrill was to pierce or perforate often with a deadly object such as a lance or sword in the 15th century to be thrilled was often to be killed. Thrill derives from an old English noun funeral meaning whole or perforation. It was William Shakespeare and his contemporaries who used the verb thrilled metaphorically as a way to express being pierced with strong emotion or to be filled with pleasure. Enter now an unlikely etymological relative. The word nostril which is a thrill of a different sort. One of the earliest English citations of the word nostril occurred in 15:00 when it was spelled n o s t h r y l pronounced something like nose

literally nose whole throughout the centuries. Writers have spelled the word and O S T H R I L L and N O S T E R L. But John Milton in his 667 poem Paradise Lost rendered it nostril and O S T R L and that's the way we spelled it sense. From Montana State University in Bozeman. This is Christy the wordsmith a k g l t f m. Good Dave herbivores Christie the wordsmith is sponsored by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Zoot enterprises. A high tech firm in Bozeman Montana offering challenging careers and innovative solutions for the financial services industry Web dot com.