Aitor, Donostia, and Zuloeta

Once you learn a word, you see it everywhere. But it's really because you floated past it before and didn't pay attention. The more you travel, the more you understand. It's a cool thing. It both shrinks the world and expands it.

A quick stumble. A list of comments for a photograph. I notice one has the name Aitor. That's my Basque teacher's name. I told my Linguistics teacher that, when she asked, and she laughed and said it was a very old fashioned name, a very local name. This Aitor's avatar? Well, it's a silhouette shot of The Comb of the Winds, a modern sculpture by Jorge Oteiza in San Sebastian, in the Basque Country. So it makes sense. :) And it's funny that I used the word silhouette - it's one of the few words that comes from Basque into English, albeit through a very strange route... something about the word coming to English from a French word that was originally a Frenched-up version of a Basque guy's last name, Zuloeta.

Funny, right?