One day this week, Phil and I were in the car at 6am. Don’t ask.

I don’t remember what we were chatting about but I started thinking about nouns that are themselves a proposition: aboard, ashore and so on. It always amuses me to say ‘I am a bed’.

I said, “Aloft – that’s a weird one because we don’t use ‘loft’, do we? We use ‘lofty’ as an adjective but we’ve lost ‘loft’. I don’t even know how you’d categorise that word.”

Phil laughed and said, “There’s literally a loft in our house.”

I had NEVER connected these words, which just goes to show how mad English is.

Anyway, I looked up the etymology and ‘loft’ is from lofte in Middle English via the Norse lopt, meaning ‘air, sky’. Your attic is literally ‘in the sky’.

That’s all. Bye!