There are lots of people today who proudly (or at least happily) describe themselves as nerds, geeks, or both. It’s quite a turnaround, because both words used to have somewhat negative connotations. They’ve also tended to converge in meaning, so that it’s not really clear what the difference is, if any (and if you’re about… Continue reading

I found this information in an abditory. If this were written in Latin, that would be abditorium, which is the source of “abditory.” The word has been around since at least 1658, when it was used by somebody known only as J Robinson in a publication called Endoxa:  “In the center of the kernel of… Continue reading

The phrase “it’s a doozy” is an American expression that means something is remarkable and usually excellent. If “His elder daughter arrives in a doozie of a snowstorm,” you know that snowstorm was particularly intense.  Popular culture contains a story about the word “doozy.” It’s said to be based on the Duesenberg automobiles of the 1920s. They… Continue reading

We pretty much take dictionaries for granted these days. But it hasn’t always been that way, and the process of creating dictionaries and dictionary entries is interesting enough that it’s been the subject of several books. The book that may have started the whole thing is The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester; it’s… Continue reading

Calling someone a “popinjay” is slightly archaic, but still in use; the guy who was White House Communications Director for about a week a few years back, Anthony Scaramucci, was called a “popinjay” by several commentators. It appears to have been Felix Salmon’s idea, who started it all the way back in 2011, when he… Continue reading

In 1624, William Bedell published a book with the riveting title Copies Certaine Letters. In it he posed a question, which has echoed down the centuries ever since: “Who were these quidams that laid hands on Scory?” A couple of hundred years later, in 1832, the London Times pointed out that “If the doctrine of our English quidams be… Continue reading

In 1593 Gabriel Harvey wrote a piece called Pierce’s Supererogation, or a New Praise of the Old Ass. It was basically an extended insult of a fellow named Thomas Nashe, and in part he refers to him as “…a dodkin author, whose two swords are like the horns of a hodmandod…”. In this he was… 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

Family is a word that’s often invoked in service of things like tradition and stability. At least in recent years. But it’s not as old a word as you might think, and it hasn’t always meant what it means now.  “Family” showed up in English in the 1400s, adopted from French. What it meant at… Continue reading

Whether you’ve heard Heard it Through the Grapevine or not, you’ve probably heard of hearing through the grapevine, and you’ve probably heard things through the grapevine. But have you ever heard why you’d hear things through a grapevine in the first place?  The grapevine, as a metaphor for people passing information individually, one-by-one, dates back… Continue reading