Torcer, Spanish for “to twist”, as well as retorcer (meaning the same) both come from the Latin root torquere.

From the Latin torquere, we also get the English… torture. You can see the t-r-k sound mapping to the English t-r-t, since the “k” sounds are very similar to the “t” sounds.

Torture, after all, is just an extreme form of being twisted: mentally, physically, and in all ways.

From the same root, we also get the English… to thwart. Funnily enough, to thwart is–in a sense–the exact opposite of torture.

Frenar (Spanish for, “to break”, particularly in the sense of, “to stop” — think of, the breaks on your car!) comes from the Latin frenare, meaning, “to restrain,” which itself is from the old Latin frenum for “birdle” — yes, the mouthpiece you put on a horse to, umm, restrain it.

From that same root, we get the English refrain. It is the same frenare root, with the re– added for emphasis. But we have the -ain spelling because it comes into English via French, with the refraigner, of course. We can see the f-r-n maps to the (re)-f-r-n very clearly as well.

The lesson here is: from restraining someone from doing something (the old sense of the word) to refraining completely from doing it (the new sense of the word) is just a minor step. At least linguistically.

Sport and the Spanish for the same, deporte, are closer than they seem.

The English sport comes from the French for the same… desporte — notice it is the same as the Spanish, except with an extra “s” (that’s a pattern that we’ll explain in the French version of this page one day!).

You can see the connection to the English clearly if we remember the “s” and we remember the de- prefix was lost over time. Thus, the s-p-r-t maps to the Spanish (d)-(s)-p-r-t.

The French desporte (and thus the English sport) and its Spanish equivalent deporte both come from the same Latin root: des- meaning “away” and portare, meaning, “to carry”.

Thus deporte, and sport, is also related to puerto (“port”) and portero (“super”, in the sense of, “superintendent”) in Spanish and port in English.

Lazar (Spanish for “to tie, such as with a ribbon”) comes from the Latin laqueum, meaning “a tie, such as a noose”. From that same root, we get the English… lasso. A lasso, after all, is really a cable that can be used to tie someone or something up…!

The l-z of lazar clearly maps to the l-ss of lasso.

The Spanish for “a hit”, Golpe, comes from the Greek for the same, Colaphus. We can see the transition in the g-l-p of golpe mapping to the c-l-ph of colaphus.

The more interesting part, however, is that, from the same root we also get the French, and English, word coup — as in, a coup d’état. Coup is just colaphus, but with the middle -l- sound disappearing in French.

So, a coup d’état is just a big hit against the state!