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

In the US, people “line up”, while in the UK, people “queue up”. But in 1837, Thomas Carlyle wrote: “That talent…of spontaneously standing in queue, distinguishes the French People.” The use of “queue” to mean a sequence of people waiting for their turn dates from the 1790s — in French. Carlyle’s quote from 1827 is… Continue reading

Imagine what it’s like to know nothing at all about how to read. Not even a general idea that the marks on a page are “letters” that represent sounds, or that when put together they represent the words you’re already familiar with hearing. If you’re from a society that’s mostly illiterate, or “preliterate,” it might… Continue reading

Spring is here, so it’s getting to be time for gardening. If you’re good at gardening, you’re said to have a “green thumb.” But get on a plane from New York to London and somewhere along the way a strange anatomical effect occurs: the green leaves your thumb and seeps sideways, and by the time… Continue reading

There’s a lot of talk about “dashboards” in the business world today. Everybody wants a dashboard presenting a summary of relevant information. Some software products are, to users, dashboards. The ready analogy, of course, is the dashboard in an automobile. It also occurs to me that as manufacturers switched from analog gauges to electrical indicators… Continue reading

There’s an old saying “up a creek without a paddle.” It means you’re in trouble — maybe fairly serious difficulty. You’ll sometimes see a shorter version, “up a creek,” which means the same thing. But you’ll only hear this expression in the US (or possibly in Australia and New Zealand), where a “creek” is a… Continue reading

When you’re “fond” of something or someone, it’s a feeling of affection or liking. Most people don’t think that’s “foolish or stupid,” but that’s where the word “fond” comes from. Its origin is in the Middle English word “fonnen,” which was a verb meaning “to be stupid” or “to make a fool of someone.” If… Continue reading

If a sailor pulled up his anchor only to discover that one of the flukes had snagged a big fluke, they would probably dismiss it as just a fluke. But the real fluke would, of course, be that the sailor had inadvertently encountered all three English words that are “fluke” in the course of a… Continue reading