Lots of elements’ names are etymologically interesting. In the upper reaches of the periodic table these days there are elements that can be produced in a laboratory, but have never been observed in nature — usually because they only exist for fractions of a second before their inherent radioactivity disperses them. Elements with the atomic… Continue reading

Eggs are in the news lately. How about “egging”? Something that happens on Halloween is “egging” — pelting a car or house with eggs in order to create a mess and play a prank. It can also happen in a theater, or at least it used to; when a performer was particularly bad, the audience… Continue reading

From Piglet to Wilbur to Babe to Animal Farm, pigs play a certain minor (or possibly mid-range) role as characters in English writing. Pigs have been domesticated for many centuries, and they’ve entered the language as well.  The thing is, most pig-related words and idioms don’t seem particularly kind to the pigs. The word “hogwash,”… Continue reading

Here’s an oddity that I’m sure has been bugging you for ages: why is a regular tooth doctor called a dentist, while a specialist tooth doctor is called a dontist, as in “periodontist” or “orthodontist?” This is your lucky day, because you’re about to find out! The “dent” in dentist and the “dont” in “-odontist”… Continue reading

In William Caxton’s 1490 translation of the Aeneid (specifically in the prologue), there is this line: “Loo, what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte, egges, or eyren? Certaynly it is hard to playse every man, by-cause of dyversite and chaunge of langage.” The line illustrates a controversy of the time: which word was going to… Continue reading

“Slim” is a more interesting word than you might think. It means “gracefully slender,” which is considered good. But its connotation, in other contexts, is not so good. “Chances of success are slim,” for example. The word comes from either Middle Dutch (slim) or Middle German (salem), where it meant slanted or crooked. The related… Continue reading

In the olden days, “old” was “eld” and “oldest” was “eldest.” “Eld” is much older…er, “elder.”.. than “old,” having been a word in Old English, when it was “eald” — at least in the dialect of Old English spoken in West Saxony. Prior to Old English, “eld” goes all the way back to Proto-Indo-European. In… Continue reading

When you start reading this, you’re on the brink of a not-particularly-important discovery. To wit: what the heck is a “brink,” anyway? You can be “on the brink” of something good, like a singer “on the brink of stardom,” or a scientist “on the brink of a major discovery.” It’s more common to find “brink”… Continue reading

If one time-traveled to the here and now from, say, about 1650, probably the very first thing they’d animadvert is that nobody animadverts any more. Or more precisely, they might animadvert (at least on their phone), but practically everyone has forgotten what “animadvert” means. In fact, everyone has forgotten so completely that “animadvert,” which in… Continue reading

“Fustian” is a rare word, but not hopelessly obscure; you’ll still run across it occasionally. It dates from the 1200s, when it meant a kind of thick cloth that was used to make blankets. Nowadays it still retains that meaning, but over the centuries it acquired a second meaning: empty, overblown language. The sort you’d… Continue reading