My writing of this week has nothing to do with terrorism. I´m going to try to write a story using inversion and passive voice. Let´s see what happen.

While living in England I was taught a lot of vocabulary and expressions from Lady Rosamund Newborough, a charming and nice old lady for whom I worked. One of the words that grasped my attention during a conversation with her was "balaclava". Do you know what a balaclava is? Here it is the definition: close-fitting garment covering the whole head and neck except for parts of the face, typically made of wool.

Never have I heard such a word before. It sounded like Spanish but the origin was unknown to me. Which was the etymology of this curious word? Was it coming from Latin or maybe Spanish? In that moment it was impossible for me to check where was it coming from and I forgot about it since it is a word not frequently used.

Little did I imagine that the answer to my question would appear unexpectedly  while reading "To The Lighthouse". Let me explain myself, there is a sentence on page 22 that reads at follows: "...he turned sharp, and rode off, to die gloriously she supposed upon the heights of Balaclava."

What a surprise! Here it was again, "Balaclava", after so long. Being written with a capital B made me to be suspicious of and then I took my monilingual dictionary and looked up for such a word discovering that there was a battle with this name.

Battle of Balaclava: a battle of the Crimean War, fought between Russia and an alliance of British, French and Turkish forces in and around the port of Balaclava (now Balaklava) in the southern Crimea in 1854. the battle ended inconclusively; it is chiefly remembered as the scene of the Charge of The Light Brigade. 

So I discovered that balaclavas were worn originally by soldiers on active service in the Crimean War, hence the name of this cloth. What a relief! What a thorn remove from my mind! What a joy!

The ways in which we learn a language are always unsuspected, you just have to be in the right place at the right moment. If I wouldn´t come to EOI to do the C1, hardly would have I ever thought about reading "To The Lighthouse" and never would have I found this word again, but I did, and now I´m proud and happy of knowing where the word balaclava is coming from. Isn´t it cool?