Word Nerd

Everyone knows that I am a total English nerd and an even more ridiculous nerd when it comes to word etymology, language evolution, and dialects. Anyway, I've always kinda found it funny that the word mortgage uses the French word mort (meaning death) as the first part of the compound. So, I decided to look it up and impart the result to all ye faithful readers:

ETYMOLOGY:
Middle English morgage, from Old French : mort, dead (from Vulgar Latin *mortus, from Latin mortuus, past participle of mor, to die; see mer- in Appendix I) + gage, pledge (of Germanic origin).

WORD HISTORY:
The great jurist Sir Edward Coke, who lived from 1552 to 1634, has explained why the term mortgage comes from the Old French words mort, “dead,” and gage, “pledge.” It seemed to him that it had to do with the doubtfulness of whether or not the mortgagor will pay the debt. If the mortgagor does not, then the land pledged to the mortgagee as security for the debt “is taken from him for ever, and so dead to him upon condition, &c. And if he doth pay the money, then the pledge is dead as to the [mortgagee].” This etymology, as understood by 17th-century attorneys, of the Old French term morgage, which we adopted, may well be correct. The term has been in English much longer than the 17th century, being first recorded in Middle English with the form morgage and the figurative sense “pledge” in a work written before 1393.

Source: http://www.bartleby.com/61/2/M0430200.html

On a completely unrelated note, I've never been able to substantiate this, but I'm pretty certain that the English word Jesus is related to the French Je suis (which translates to English as I am).