Camaraderie
comes from French camarade, which is also the source of English's comrade,
meaning "friend or associate." Camarade means "roommate,"
"companion," or "a group sleeping in one room." It is
related to Latin camera, meaning "chamber."
Ad-lib
is a shortening of Latin ad libitum, which means "in accordance with one's
wishes." In the past, ad libitum was used to refer to any activity where
the performer was free to do whatever they liked for as long as desired,
whether the activity be drawing, working math problems, talking, playing music,
or acting.
Lenient
comes from lenis, the Latin word for "soft" or "mild." It
was originally applied to something soothing that relieved pain or stress; the
related lenitive has the same meaning. Linguists also borrowed lenis to
describe speech sounds that are softened—for instance, the "t" sound
in gutter.
According
to German folklore, all living creatures have a spirit double who is invisible
but identical to the living individual. These second selves are perceived as
being distinct from ghosts (which appear only after death), and sometimes they
are described as the spiritual opposite or negative of their human
counterparts. German writers coined the word Doppelgänger (from doppel-,
meaning "double," and -gänger, meaning "goer") to refer to
such specters.
As
a prefix, arch- appears in a number of titles referring to positions of
superiority, such as archduke and archbishop; it can also mean
"chief" (as in archnemesis) or "extreme"
(archconservative). It comes from the Greek verb archein, meaning "to
begin or to rule."
Loss
of the sound of "r" after a vowel and before a consonant in the
middle of a word is common in spoken English. This linguistic idiosyncrasy has
given the language a few new words, including cuss from curse, bust from burst,
and passel from parcel.