keel

Dec. 14th, 2022 08:30 am
prettygoodword: text: words are sexy (Default)
[personal profile] prettygoodword
keel (KEEL) - n., a measure of coal equivalent to 21.2 long tons, 424 hundredweight, or 21.5 metric tons.


Or more derivatively, the amount of coal that can be carried by a keelboat on the Tyne and Wear rivers of England -- a keelboat being a type of flat-bottomed barge with a keel (so it can sail into the wind) particular to those rivers. Interestingly, the keel on a keelboat is not the same keel: the keel beneath a boat is from Old English (and before that Old Norse) while the keel- of keelboat is from Dutch, both ultimately from the same Germanic root.

Meta note I’ve been meaning to mention for a while now: Most of my pronunciation guides are I think pretty clear, but there’s one vowel sound that’s not entirely intuitive: in my system, the vowel sound that is the word eye 👁 is rendered as AI. This means that I give the pronunciation of lied as LAID (while laid is LAYD). My mnemonic for this is “the final sound of samurAI.”

---L.

Date: 2022-12-14 05:47 pm (UTC)
jesse_the_k: Elderly smiling white woman captioned "When I was your age I had to walk ten miles in the snow to get stoned & have sex" (old fogey)
From: [personal profile] jesse_the_k

Thanks for the mnemonic!

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