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

Some time ago — and by “some time” I mean roughly a century and a half and more — if you were going to walk somewhere fairly distant you might say you were going to “ride shank’s mare” or “shank’s pony.” “Shank” means shin, and the expression came out of Scotland sometime in the 1700s.… Continue reading

Guinea pigs are a bit of a puzzle, terminology-wise. They’re rodents, not pigs. They’re not from Guinea, either; they were first found in South America — or rather, their ancestors were; the guinea pigs that are now pets have been domesticated enough that they differ quite a bit from the wild variety. Not quite to… Continue reading

One thing about English is that the number of words it includes has gotten completely out of hand. Although there isn’t any way to figure out what the actual total is (it’s not that easy to decide what counts as a word), there are probably at least 250,000. There are even estimates as high as… Continue reading

One of the bewilderingly many ways to form words in English is by prepending “be-.” That is, the syllable “be” is put in front of another word, which then becomes a new word. If English was read top to bottom instead of left to right, of course, the modified, bespoke word would be beneath the… Continue reading

Here’s a pair of words that are occasionally confused: “waive” (to voluntarily give up the right to something) and “waif” (an orphaned child — this one is a bit archaic at this point). The interesting thing about this pair of words is that although their meanings are quite distinct, ithey’re pretty closely related.  The words… Continue reading

One thing about English is that the number of words it includes has gotten completely out of hand. Although there isn’t any way to figure out what the actual total is (it’s not that easy to decide what counts as a word), there are probably at least 250,000. There are even estimates as high as… Continue reading

Dictionaries are biased toward words they can find in print. When a word is in use, but mostly spoken rather than printed, it can fly under the dictionary radar. One such word is blatherskite, an “informal” word (in dictionary-speak that means it’s mostly spoken) that’s a regional Americanism.  “Blatherskite” means both nonsense and a person… Continue reading

Amid the chaos of everyday life, it’s common to mistake one word for another, or to think that two words might be related even though they aren’t. And the way English works, if enough people make the same mistake, it’s not really a mistake any more and ends up memorialized in the dictionary.  “Chaos” is… Continue reading

Whether we realize it or not, we live in an era of pedantic vegetable names. A mere hundred years ago, H.G. Wells could write this: “…Mr. Moses Gluckstein, a city gent and very pleasant and fond of sparrowgrass and chokes.” But nowadays, you’d just have to go with the more formal “asparagus and artichokes.” Wells… Continue reading