Once Upon a Time There Was a Word

I have recently rediscovered my passion for linguistics. It has a lot to do with my becoming a topic editor at the Language Study topic at Suite101. It feels like riding a bike after having slept for 20 years. Or drinking that specific syrup you were used to as a kid, because it was the only one that existed; then it disappeared and you can only remember it tasted like heaven. (Everyone in/from Romania, remember BemBem?)*
As I was browsing through a fairly big and mostly unsorted mass of articles, some outdated, some beside the point, and some very interesting and informative, I learnt to count to ten in Japanese, picked up some French vocabulary and managed to squeeze in some Spanish grammar. I didn't even try to understand the Arabic lesson.
Wandering in this land of multilingualism was like browsing through a magical phonebook which doesn't only list numbers and addresses, but particularities like "John Smith likes to fish and his wife can never understand that" or "Jane Smith had her first tooth fall out when she was five and next day she met the Tooth Fairy". Except the stories here are not about people, but about words. And words, I must admit, can sometimes be much more interesting than people. Sometimes. But the stories told by words are usually far more interesting than those told by people.
This entire experience inspired me enough to finish my article about words of Hungarian origin that have ended up in English. And, of course, the stories they tell. When I shared this article with my friend from Lithuania, he told me another such story, that I had not known before. Perhaps because I don't know the first thing about Lithuanian language or culture or history. Which is not something to brag about and I should do something about it.
Antanas told me that the Lithuanian name for the German nation is vokietis. This term was born in Medieval times when German crusaders invaded the land. Vo is an interjection like look! or hey!, and kietas means hard/solid/tough  - a reference to the the heavy armour of the knights. Now tell me if that does not make you go Wow! If it doesn't, it means you're a perfectly normal human being, not (yet?) spirited away by languages and words. If it does, you're my kind of wacko!
On a final note, I must mention that I'm leaving for Croatia tomorrow. I wonder how many Croatian words I'll manage to pick up. And how many of those will reveal their story to me. But if I find a story, I'll be sure to share it with you.
*I have no idea if the product from the Bem Bem link is the real thing or not. It may or may not be. I linked it there only in order to remind you of Bem Bem.