I've read about how the word 'aisle' and 'isle' each came from the French 'aile' and 'ile', respectively. I also read how the there was confusion between the two words, such that when 'isle' gained its 's', 'aisle' soon followed. Does anyone know the full story?
Learn English – The history of ‘aisle’ and ‘isle’
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From the comments to the OP:
My understanding of the terms "hardcore" and "softcore" come from baseball and softball, and the term "hardcore" at least is roughly synonymous with "playing hardball" which is definitely baseball-related.
More in-depth: Since the early 1900s at least, baseball has been played with the eponymous cork-cored, twine-wrapped, leather-skinned sphere that has near-universal recognition. The only significant change to the "official" baseball used in the major leagues was during WWII when rubber was substituted as the core material to replace cork (which was needed for the war effort). Cork baseballs are small, dense, and not very forgiving; in fact, players have died from head trauma after being "beaned" and been forced to retire after making barehanded catches that shattered every bone in their hand. Such a ball is a "hardball", and playing with it is "hardcore baseball".
The game of softball is not that much newer (1887 vs 1845 for baseball), but it evolved from the game we have come to know as baseball to create a more "casual" game. The name "softball" came from the original construction of softballs; primarily similar to baseballs, but much larger (up to 16" in circumference) and more loosely wound. As the early balls broke in, they really did become soft, and the game was actually originally intended to be played barehanded (thus requiring virtually no individual equipment; just one bat, one ball, and some base markers). Modern softballs are not very soft, and so the modern game is played with gloves (and "fast-pitch" leagues for women use practically all the same gear as men's baseball leagues with the primary exception of "pelvic protectors" replacing athletic cups), but the balls still "give" more than cork baseballs, and more often incorporate softer core materials such as rubber.
The two games have both been around long enough in recognizable forms, along with the eponymous balls used to play them, to be the origins of the terms. My thoughts are that "hardcore" came first, and then "softcore" followed as a complementary antonym. Unfortunately the sexual connotation the terms have gained makes it difficult to do real research into the terms themselves from a work computer. I know the term "hardcore" has been commonly used figuratively since at least the Vietnam War.
Why spell it connoisseur?
You’ve basically answered your own question here.
The French word has been spelt connaître for close to two centuries.
Connoisseur was borrowed into the English language some time around three centuries ago, when it was spelt that way in French.
The fact that French has changed the spelling of the French since does not mean that English (who is, generally speaking, very conservative about changing spellings) will change the spelling of the English word.
Similarly, around the same time as connoisseur was borrowed, the verb itself was also borrowed as reconnoitre (now spelt reconnoiter in American English—one of the places where English has changed spellings, though in a more or less systematic fashion). That word is pronounced with the stress on the ‹oi›, which is pronounced as /oi/. ‘Updating’ the spelling to the current French spelling would make the spelling less representative of the pronunciation of the word, which would be silly. When English spelling does get updated, at least it’s usually to make it more representative of pronunciation.
French has undergone a sound change, whereby the older diphthong /oi/ split into two different forms: one was /wa/, the other /ai/, which was later monophthongised into /ɛ/. The first of these is still spelt ‹oi› (as in François), whereas the latter is now spelt ‹ai› (as in Français). But this change mainly happened at a stage where many words had already entered the English language, and thus it was not reflected in those English words.
Some words were borrowed later on, though, and in those words, the English pronunciation/spelling match that of Modern French: in je ne sais quoi, the last word is pronounced /kwa/ as in Modern French; and in reconnaissance (which was borrowed about a century later than reconnoitre and connoisseur), the spelling in French had already changed, so the English form matches the Modern French form.
Why use the word at all?
Your second question seems to be doing the same as your first question: implicitly assuming that French does not change. This is of course not so.
If you look in a French dictionary, the word connaisseur is indeed there. My Hachette Dictionnaire de la Langue Française, for example, defines it very simply:
connaisseur, euse a, n Expert en une chose.
The fact that this is not a word French people tend to use nowadays doesn’t mean they didn’t 300 years ago when it was borrowed into English. The fact that it was borrowed at all suggests that they did, in fact.
Whether a word stops being used and fades into obscurity or maintains its popularity in any given language is completely unpredictable. The fact that this word has all but vanished from colloquial French, but managed to stay alive and kicking in English, is quite random and could not have been predicted; but once the word was there in English, there’s no reason the English should stop using it just because the French did.
Best Answer
Here is the discussion of island and isle in John Ayto, Arcade Dictionary of Word Origins (1990):
Meanwhile, Ayto offers this comment on aisle:
Glynnis Chantrell, The Oxford Dictionary of Word Histories (2002), and Eric Partridge, Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English (1966), offer similar accounts of the relevant words, but Ayto's discussion is the most detailed and most readable of the three.