words wholly unrelated

hellion & hell

because i’m breaking my day long fast of the internet in observance of bloomsday, you know that what i am about to tell you has got to be as important as when abc news interrupted the view to inform me that they heard from the new york times who heard from “a friend close to the source” that a democratic exhibitionist from new york has probably decided to resign because embarrassing cameraphone images of his weirdly brozilian-waxed body have been leaked to the public by his internet girlfriends and his new wife is pregnant and his name is wiener.

anyway, hellion (a devilish person or mischievous child) comes from the scottish dialectical hallion (a worthless fellow). hell is a very old proto-germanic word meaning “the concealed place.” the spelling of the former may have been influenced by the latter, though both ultimately derive from separate sources.

now back to pretending to read ulysses…