23/011 Greek Word

εκπαραθυρώνω – defenestrate

I love it when a word is immediately understandable. In Greek, like English, it can be used literally and metaphorically. The current metaphorical favourite in British English is ‘throw someone under/in front of a bus’. Were I to translate that into Greek, I would probably choose εκπαραθυρώνω.

As Greek has borrowed extensively from Latin, Italian and French, I wondered if there was a Latinate word corresponding to παράθυρο. Somehow, I felt I had come across such a word in the dim and distant past, and voilà!

φινιστρίνι (from Italian) is a porthole.

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