Recently I read a book on the sources of English words, and the book had an interesting statistic, which I now wish I had memorized. It said something to the effect that 80% of the words that we use in everyday life come from Old English. I consider this a remarkable fact, given how archaic Old English seems now.

Then last week I was in the airport at Monterey, California, and I had time to study a sign put up by the Transportation Safety Authority. The sign said:

If it can be

poured
sprayed
squeezed
smeared OR
spread

then it is a
liquid, aerosol or gel.

I surmised that all the verbs were Germanic/Old English, and all the nouns were Latinate. I've looked up the words at the Yahoo Reference site, and except for 'poured', I was right.

spray - Middle Dutch
squeeze - Middle English
smear - Middle English. Originally meant to anoint, if you can imagine that.

spread - Old Enlish

'Poured' is a bit mysterious. My unabridged dictionary says 'origin uncertain.' Yahoo says perhaps from the Old North French. Never heard of Old North French before!

The nouns [liquid, aerosol, and gel] are all Latinate. Well, almost. 'aero' is Greek.

I think it's kind of cute that when the TSA wanted to describe actions it used Germanic/Old English words, and to categorize things, it turned to Latinate forms.

Since this was in California, I now want to know how you say 'squeeze, smear, and spread' in Spanish.