It’s nowhere near November or Thanksgiving, so we have plenty of time to consider the word “turkey.” The first thing to consider is that the bird has that name because of a mistake. The North American species was confused with a bird called a “guinea fowl,” and those were thought to be from Turkey. Two… Continue reading

A lot of English speakers — and maybe this goes for other languages too — have pet peeves about the way other people use, misuse, or “misuse” words.  The words compose and comprise are easy to get mixed up. Or maybe not. If you go by the “first” definitions of both of these, then you’d… Continue reading

Eponyms are words that come from someone’s name. “Flack” is an eponym because it came from Gene Flack. “Dickens,” as in the old fashioned “oh he’s just a little dickens,” is not an eponym based on Charles Dickens; “dickens” was a synonym for “devil” a couple of centuries ago. But “boycott,” refusing to engage in… Continue reading

The American slang phrase “throw the book at [someone]” means to apply the maximum legal punishment. The most common usage is something like this: “the judge really threw the book at Ralph; he won’t get out of prison for twenty years.” But really, which book is that — the one getting thrown? The legal tomes… Continue reading

“A sophistiocal rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign an opponent and glorify himself.” That’s what Benjamin Disraieli said about William Gladstone in 1878.  Decades before Disraeli and Gladstone rose to prominence… Continue reading

Wouldn’t it be nice if English words, once they meant something specific, just retained that meaning? Well, it might be nice, but it definitely wouldn’t be “nice.” The word “nice,” over the many, many years the word has existed, had these meanings: silly, lascivious, ostentatious, scrupulous, fastidious, polite, respectable, cowardly, lazy, delicate, strange, shy, undecided,… Continue reading

If you embark on a “wild goose chase”, you’re trying to do something that’s probably not going to work. But where did that phrase come from?  Most people assume that it would be very difficult to catch a wild goose, so the idea of chasing one is foolish and pointless. You’ll even see that explanation… Continue reading

Words and language are a sort of fashion just as subject to fads and not-necessarily-sensible ideas as to what colors are “in” and what one “simply must” wear. One linguistic fashion that’s appeared once or twice in English is the desire to sound more Latin.  Everybody knows — or at least they should — that… Continue reading

The word “literally” comes from the Latin “literalis’ (pertaining to letters) and its (ahem) literal meaning is “word for word” or “exactly.” You most often see it used in sentences like this: “After getting that promotion I was literally walking on air.” Now, it’s very close to literally true that the speaker was not literally… Continue reading