Have you ever gone outside on a clear, calm night, and enjoyed looking up at the stars as they…skinkled? Or, as in an 1888 newspaper story, maybe you’ve watched “A handful of flame which..merely skinkles on the window-panes.” It’s true; in addition to twinkling, sparkling, gleaming, shimmering, flickering, glittering, winking, gleaming, scintillating, and corsuscating, objects that produce… Continue reading

There are any number of diseases one can catch, but have you ever noticed that two of them — mumps and measles — are plural? There’s not really any singular version; a mild case of mumps isn’t a “mump,” and there doesn’t seem to be any recorded case of anyone catching a “measle.”  There are… Continue reading

Most of the time abbreviations are pretty intuitive, or are supposed to be. The abbreviation for a US state, for example, is designed to be recognizable, so for Massachusetts we get “MA,” and for Texas it’s “TX.” The abbreviation for US dollars is the straightforward “USD.” “In” stands for “inch” and “tsp” means “teaspoon.” It’s… Continue reading

I was really walking on air yesterday, humming great songs like Walking on Sunshine, Walk on the Wild Side, Walking Man, Walk the Line, Walk like an Egyptian, and Walking on the Moon, but then I walked into a brick wall when it turned out I hadn’t been hitting my stride at all, but walking… Continue reading

You wouldn’t think that an innocent phrase like bunny rabbit could contain any centuries-old mysteries, but it does! Well, sort of.  “Rabbit,” of course, refers to wooden mugs often used in the 1600s to serve beer…no, wait, never mind that; a “rabbit” is a cute, furry, long-eared fellow very fond of carrots. The word “rabbit”… Continue reading

There are plenty of movies about “werewolves”, and at least one about a “wererabbit.” You might think that the “were” part has to do with something like “you were a human but now you’re a [fill in the blank].” But that’s not it at all. “Were” is a very old word (predating Old English) meaning… Continue reading

Word of the day: teetotal There was a temperance movement in the early 1800s in England, and it spread to the US by the 1820s. Before that, alcohol was widely used as a beverage, a medicine, and even, in the case of beer, nourishment. Water was often unsafe to drink, and other beverages (milk, for… Continue reading

An interesting approach to looking at word origins is to start with a year instead of a word. The Oxford English Dictionary very helpfully provides a list of the words first cited in a particular year. Let’s try 1982. That was the year that Tylenol laced with potassium cyanide killed seven people in and around… Continue reading

You hear — usually in competing media — about “tabloid journalism” and “the tabloids.” But doesn’t “tabloid” seem like a weird word for a kind of newspaper? That’s because it is — and it originally meant something very different. It all started back in 1880 in London. Henry Wellcome started a business with Silas Burroughs:… Continue reading

If you’re fond of both language and math, you surely already know that in the phrase “5 minus 3” the number 5 is the minuend and the number 3 is the subtrahend. Since that’s not news, it’s a good thing that 5 less 3 is not really the subject of this bit of trivia. No,… Continue reading