“Prolegomenon” was borrowed straight from Latin in the early 1600s, about the time when authors in English got a serious grasp on the sequence “I’ll tell you want I’m gonna tell you, then I’lll tell you, then I’ll tell you what I just told you.” It’s either an introductory chapter, or in more ambitious undertakings,… Continue reading

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) contains over 300,000 entries — and that’s just the “main” entries; there are minor entries and subentries galore. There have so far been only two editions of the OED, the first published starting in 1884 (it took until 1928 to finish the whole publication) and the second in 1989. They… Continue reading

It first showed up in The Pickwick Papers, published in 1836. Charles Dickens was the author, but it was his first novel, and originally he used the pseudonym “Boz.” He also used that name on his very first publication, Sketches by Boz. Incidentally, the original title of The Pickwick Papers was the The Posthumous Papers… Continue reading

One characteristic of English that makes word games possible is the typical patterns of letter combinations. For instance, there are combinations like “st” and “pr” that you run into all the time. On the other hand, you hardly ever see “kf” or “jp” in combination. When you find a word that includes a rare combination,… Continue reading

“Pining away” is something one does when exhausted by emotional suffering. Like when you’re a dog, and your human goes to work without you. Or when you’re the heroine of a romance novel and your prince charming is called away by the king to go into battle against the bad guys. Nowadays it’s considered a… Continue reading

Beowulf, a long poem written sometime around 1000 CE (give or take a century or so), at one point mentions a monster named Nickera, who lives in a lake. In the poem it appears that “Nickera” is the monster’s name, but actually “nicker” (or nicor) was an Old English word for any sort of imaginary… Continue reading

Probably because I’m so fell, it fell to me in one fell swoop, as I worked a fell on my loom in my home in the fell, clothed in fells of sheep, to recount the odd history of “fell.”  “Fell” is a perfectly common, modern word. And it’s also rare. And it’s also obsolete and… Continue reading

One characteristic of English that makes word games possible is the typical patterns of letter combinations. For instance, there are combinations like “st” and “pr” that you run into all the time. On the other hand, you hardly ever see “kf” or “jp” in combination. When you find a word that includes a rare combination,… Continue reading

When you hear the phrase “tin pan alley,” if you think of anything at all, you probably think of the US music business. The term began to be used around the turn of the 20th Century, and at the time referred to a specific location: 28th Street between Broadway and 6th Avenue. That was where… Continue reading