Amenazar (Spanish for “to threaten”) has a curious origin: from the Latin mine, meaning, “lead” or sometimes “silver.” Remember, this was the material that weapons — swords, arrowheads, etc. — were made of. If you don’t comply with my threat–I will hurt you!

Although this isn’t directly related to the English mine (the place where you get silver!), they might have the same original root–and it is an easy mnemonic. After all, we mine silver in the mines.

Today’s pattern is so easy that you won’t recognize it until we tell you!

The classic English last name Fletcher was given to those who made arrows. This is unsurprising if we remember the Spanish word for arrow is… flecha. The f-l-ch root is obvious in both of them!

Now is when we all go in unison: ahhhhh!

The Spanish apoyar, to help, has a surprising root: podiare, the Latin meaning “to step on.” Think of the Spanish pie, from the same root.

This came about through an interesting linguistic turn of events: podiare originally meant “to step on” and then it came to mean, “to raise up” — like, to put on a podium. A podium is, after all, a raised platform that you step on!

Helping someone, in Spanish, is thus a form of lifting them up — literally. Or maybe, stepping on them?

This implies a question: what happened to the -d-? The p-y of apoyar maps to the p-d of podium, but how did the -d- turn into a -y-? The answer is that apoyar entered Spanish, from podiare, via Italian — it first turned into appoggiare, the Italian for the same! So, the -d- turned into a -g- which turned into a -y-.

The common Spanish word for “to enjoy”, disfrutarse has an unlikely cousin: fruit.

Both come from the same root, the Latin fructus meaning, “something you enjoy.” We do enjoy fruit after all — it is the classical dessert.

In English, we do have the remains of fruit in this sense in the occasional phrases, like, “the fruits of your labor.”

We can see the mapping of both the English and Spanish to each other in the f-r-t root in both.

Etapa (Spanish for “stage, level”) comes from old Dutch word (remember, the whole Spanish-Netherlands 80 years war? They did influence each other a lot!) stapel meaning, “deposit; store.”

The English staple comes from the Old German stapulaz (“pillar”) — from which we also get the Dutch stapel and then the Spanish etapa!

But how did a word meaning “pillar” become “stage” or “staple”? Well, a pillar holds up the next level — the next stage! (Think of floors in a building as being stages of development. Ultimately, we reach the penthouse!). Or think about the pillar — that which holds everything else up so it doesn’t fall — is the staple of the building, the most basic building block, to ensure it doesn’t collapse!

We can see the t-p root in both the English and Spanish words.

The Spanish apañar (“to fix, to rig”, as in “to fix the jury”) comes from the Latin pannus, which meant “cloth, garment or rag.” How did this transformation happen, as Latin turned into Spanish? Well, you use a cloth to tie people, which is one way of applying pressure — physically and metaphorically.

From the same Latin root pannus, we get the English… pane. As in a window pane. Here, the metaphorical meeting of the cloth or clothing took on the meaning of a divider — which divides one section from the other. Which is precisely the opposite meaning of its Spanish counterpart!

You can see the p-n root in both. And it’s always noteworthy that the Latin double n –nn– consistently transformed into the ñ in Spanish.

Izar (Spanish for “hoist” — as in, you hoist the flag) comes from the French hisser for the same, which itself comes from the old German words for the same, hissen. And from that German root, we get the English hoist itself. The i-z root of izar clearly maps to the hoi-s root of hoist.

Veda (Spanish for “closed season” such as, the time of year when you can’t hunt for your favorite beast) comes from the Latin vetare, which meant, “to forbid”.

In fact, from the same Latin root, we get the English… veto. Veto is actually the first-person conjugation in Latin: “I forbid!”

We can clearly see the that the v-d of veda maps to the v-t of veto.

It might be obvious to you that survive comes from the same root as vivir (Spanish, meaning “to live”), although that was not obvious to me at first despite both sharing the v-v-r root.

What is interesting, however, is the origin of survive–from the Latin super- (“to go over”) with the root vivire (“to live,” just as in vivir). Thus, to survive literally means “to live beyond” or “live past” other people — it is a purely comparative word! It’s not living; it’s living longer than someone else. This explains why its original sense and the first usages of the word were in the context of inheritances: he who survives the others gets the inheritance.

The Spanish for “cheap,” barato, and the English barter both come from the same root, the Old French barater, meaning, “to barter, cheat, deceive, haggle.”

The word, over time, lost most of its negative connotation in both languages — neither barato nor barter are particularly strong negative words — although both have that touch of uneasiness, that we try to feel we are better than.