Alternate Meanings
The common English phrase "it warms the cockles of my heart", is used to mean that a feeling of deep-seated contentment has been generated.
Differing derivations of this phrase have been proposed, either directly from the perceived heart-shape of a cockleshell, or indirectly (the scientific name for the type genus of the family is Cardium, from the Latin for heart), or from the Latin diminutive of the word heart, corculum. Another proposed derivation is from the Latin for the ventricles of the heart, cochleae cordis, where the second word is an inflected form of cor, heart, while cochlea is the Latin for snail.
Read more about this topic: Cockle (bivalve)
Famous quotes containing the words alternate and/or meanings:
“Strange, that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“You can’t write about people out of textbooks, and you can’t use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence.”
—Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980)