The Olympics, The Best Battlefield

(NOTE: I did this one paragraph, below, in February 2014, but it is just as appropriate for us now, as the Winter Olympics 2018 are in progress in one of the world's most dangerous areas, the Korean Peninsula.) 

I've been enjoying the 2014 Winter Olympics. It would be a great thing if Olympic venues were the only "battlefields" where nations met in competition, instead of on the real battlefields of war. It's nice to watch the games and to think that mankind might one day be able to limit the competition to these kinds of games, but then we must return to reality. DAMN!

WORD HISTORY:
Battle-This word goes back to Indo European "bhau," which had the notion "to hit, to beat, to strike." This gave its Celtic offspring^ some similar, but unknown form, which spawned a form in its Gaulish dialect, perhaps "bata," which was borrowed by Latin as "battuere," which meant "to strike," which then produced Latin "battualia" (gladiator fighting techniques), and then the derived "battalia" (fighting). Old French, a Latin based language, inherited a form of the word as "battaille," which meant "fight, battle, combat." English borrowed the word from French in the late 1200s or early 1300s as "battel," before the modern version. The verb form was derived from the noun.

^ Celtic is one of the branches of Indo European. Celtic's dialects once were widespread in Europe, but it's much more limited survivors today are largely Welsh, Breton, Irish Gaelic, Scots Gaelic and Manx (from the Isle of Man), all much diminished themselves and struggling to survive. Celtic, like Germanic, was an offshoot of Indo European; thus its modern survivors are related to English, but further down the family tree.