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BOY AND GIRL GASKETS

8/26/2020

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The word gasket (describing a type of mechanical seal) was borrowed in the early seventeenth century from the Middle French noun gaskette, with the same definition. There's a lot of uncertainty about where that comes from, but the leading theory is that it's from garcette, meaning "little girl", perhaps through a figurative nautical sense of "plaited coil". That would be a diminutive of garce, which referred to young women, harlots, or concubines, and garce was a feminine version of garcon​, which still means "boy". Finally, that traces to the Frankish reconstruction wrakjo ("servant" or "boy"), to Proto-Germanic wrakjon ("exile") and Proto-Indo-European wreg ("track" or "hunt"). The expression to blow a gasket emerged in the 1940s, when gaskets used to seal pressure in car engines were known to occasionally degrade and pop.
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    Hello! I'm Adam Aleksic, a sophomore studying linguistics and government at Harvard University, where I founded the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society. I also have disturbing interests in politics, vexillology, geography, board games, conlanging, and law. 
      If I don't cover it soon, I probably already did it
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