The Latin word for shadow is “umbra,” and it shows up a number of places in English. The first place it shows up, although maybe not the first place people nowadays would think of, is the actual English word “umbra.” It’s not necessarily a literal shadow; one usage of “umbra” means ghost — either a… Continue reading

Thanks mostly to air travel, it’s not unusual to meet someone from practically any country on earth. You may have even met a Padanian. But you won’t find Padania on a map, in an atlas, or in the United Nations. That’s because it’s the name of a nation that doesn’t exist. But people really live… Continue reading

There’s something out of kilter about the way we use the word “kilter.” The word’s first appearance in print (in modern form) was around 1600. For about a century before that it was “kelter.” Both kilter and its immediate predecessor “kelter” mean “in good order or good condition.” But various dialects of English have had… Continue reading

Back in the 1800s, the name “Maria” was roughly as common as it is today, but it was pronounced “mah-RYE-ah” instead of what’s common today, “mah-REE-ah.” We still use the old pronunciation, but only when the name is spelled with an “h:” “Mariah.” But if you were in New York City around the 1830s, and… Continue reading

The habitual habiliments of nuns are habits. “Habit”, meaning the uniform of a Catholic nun, is not related to the word “habiliment” (which means clothing), even though it sounds like it might be. Instead, a nun’s “habit” is short for “habitual” because they wear the same outfit all the time. You might wonder why the… Continue reading

It all started in…well, it’s pretty difficult to pin down a specific point where it all started. It could have been in 1800, when Thomas Wedgewood was the first to produce an image by exposing paper treated with silver nitrate to light. Or maybe it was George Eastman, who patented the the “roll of film”… Continue reading

For an old North American colloquial word that started showing up in the 1800s, “foofaraw” has a surprisingly robust entry in the Oxford English Dictionary. “Foofaraw” originated in the western US, and at first meant fussy, vain, or gaudy. It was carried back to England and appeared in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1848: “Them white… Continue reading

The Antarctic Mystery with Another Antarctic Mystery In 1897 Jules Verne wrote An Antarctic Mystery. It’s a two-volume novel that is a sort of a sequel to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Sequels are pretty common, of course, but in this case Verne’s novel was a sequel to a book written by… Continue reading

Old joke: “there are no roads in the City of London”. (The City of London is relatively small, ancient, and not the same as “London” itself). The joke is true; there’s not a single passageway there called a “road” — because by the time “road” entered English, every similar thing in the City of London… Continue reading

Some English words exist only as what sound like negative forms, like “incognito.” You never hear about anyone going around “cognito,” after all. But there are also some that were originally positive words, then gained a negative form, then the positive form faded out of use leaving us with only…for example…“ineffable.”  Something that’s “ineffable” can’t… Continue reading