Cargarse (Spanish for, “to take charge”; a very common word, often used in the sense of, assigning or accepting responsibility) comes from the Latin carrus, meaning, cart.

How did this evolution happen? Easy: you load a cart; the cart takes on the burden; just as you, by accepting responsibility, are taking on a burden, too. In other words, any action you might need to be responsible for achieving is just like the annoying junk in your trunk, holding down the car!

From the same Latin root, we get the English, caricature. You can see the c-r root in both. The word for “cart” turned into caricature because, well, a caricature is an overloading (!). A caricature, then, is literally just piling on more and more needless extra, exaggerated observations into the picture you paint, until your trunk is similarly burdened down!

Funny how, in English, over-loading a car is an exaggeration, a caricature. But in Spanish, it is just the normal way of taking responsibility.

Árbol, Spanish for “tree” comes from the Latin arbor, for the same. We can see the Latin to Spanish evolution easily recognizing the common r-to-l swap, where the “r” and “l” sounds in many languages are often interchanged.

From the same Latin root, we get a variety of related English words, such as herb and arbor, as in Ann Arbor, home of the great University of Michigan. We also get some other Spanish words, such as hierba, meaning “grass”.

The pattern is easy to spot in the vowel-r-b root: a-r-b for árbol and e-r-b for herb.

Continuing in our days-of-the-week series, there is finally Friday — the night we love to go out on. Indeed, this is basically the meaning of this weekday name, in both Spanish and English!

The Spanish viernes for the last day before the Weekend comes from Latin for the day of the Goddess “Venus”, the Goddess of Love, of course (who went by the name of Aphrodite in Greece).

And the English Friday comes from the old Germanic for the Day of Fryga — Fryga was the Germanic Goddess of Love, their equivalent of Venus!

We can see the parallel with the V-R in viernes and the F-R in Friday. The Germanic F-s also often maps to Latin V-s.

The Spanish hipoteca for “mortgage” comes from the Greek hypo– (“down”) and tithenai (“to put, place”). Why? A mortgage is when you put down a deposit, and you put down your commitment to pay it off until it’s all paid down.

From the root tithenai we also get the English… theme. A theme is when you put down one topic you will consistently return to during the course of the event!

This etymology is almost as good as the English equivalent, mortgage… which literally means, pledge until you’re dead. Yup, the same mort- as in death! A mortgage is — literally — what you’ll be paying until you die!

Parecer, Spanish for “to appear”, comes from the Latin parere, meaning the same. As does the Spanish verb form, aparecer.

Obviously to some but not to others, from the same root comes the English appearas well as… apparition. What is an apparition if not something that appears to you but doesn’t really exist?

We can see the relationship because the p-r of parecer maps to the p-r in both appear and apparition.