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English Please: Lumber

A child’s building blocks are Lego… grown-ups use lumber. Lumber’s modern usage as ‘wooden planks for construction’ goes back to the 1660’s… but before that, it’s a bit different. See, the first recorded use of ‘lumber’ as a noun is from the 1550’s as ‘heavy, useless furniture’. But it was two hundred years prior that lumber entered the English language as a verb, to lumber is to clumsily move about. It reasons if one were to awkwardly carry a big, heavy wardrobe, they’d be lumbering about. You’d lumber as you carry lumber. Interesting – the similar-sounding word, cumbersome, also means difficult to carry.

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