In some kinds of novels and movies, the plot rides on a special object that’s absolutely necessary for the story to work, but doesn’t really do anything at all — even in the story — and in some cases it doesn’t even appear. That object is a MacGuffin. He probably didn’t come up with the Continue reading

In 1872, in Nebraska, Louise Pound was born. She grew up to be a professor of English at the University of Nebraska. More to the point, she studied folklore — specifically, slang and dialects across middle America. The thing about most of these spoken variants of language is just that; they’re spoken, and not typically Continue reading

“Fit to be tied” is a sort of puzzling thing to say. Is it supposed to mean you’re “fit” as in able (“all fit to go”), as in “physically fit,” as in “appropriate” (“a fit subject for discussion”), carefully measured (“fitted suit”), or something else? And what’s all this about being tied? Does it mean Continue reading

It’s easy to see that the way we use language changes over time. Dictionaries are one way to measure this, particularly over the long term. Compare a dictionary from a century ago to a modern version and you can see changes in meanings of words as well as changes in the words that are used Continue reading

If Shakespeare is in the lead in adding words and phrases to English (and actually he might not be), Charles Dickens is the champion of character names, particularly for his villains. Dickens’ characters often have funny, ironic, sarcastic, or otherwise telling names, and some of them also enter the language. It’s not terribly unusual, even Continue reading

Medical doctors often specialize in a particular area, and those specialties feature English that’s heavily populated with Latin- and Greek-originated words. For example, there might be a “thoracic” specialist focusing on the torso — that specialty comes from “thorax”, which comes from the Greek word for the breastplate part of a suit of armor. An Continue reading

It’s pretty conventional, in mainline western-civilization thinking at least, to have a high regard for the combination of knowledge and judgment we’d call “wisdom.” In fact, if you were to rate English words by their positive connotation for most people, “wisdom” would probably come out somewhere near the top of the list. At least so 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 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