Back in the British Isles of more than a thousand years ago, sloping off in a group to pummel the crew from the next town or county was common enough that everybody knew the first steps were to “kilt” your skirt or robe so your legs would be free (possibly to run the other way… Continue reading

The word “flibbertigibbet” is a cute label for somebody who tends to fly foolishly from one thing to another, or to chatter on nonsensically. It sort of seems like a frivolous word, and it even sounds like something that might have been coined in the late 1800s or so, doesn’t it?  Surprisingly enough (that means… Continue reading

Imagine you want to build a clock, but annoyingly enough, you find yourself stuck several centuries in the past, and you don’t really know how to start. The first thing you need is something that “ticks” in a reliably steady cadence. Enter the pendulum. Pendulums swing back and forth pretty steadily. Pendulums started being used… Continue reading

Again is a word that comes up…well, again and again in conversation. It’s been around for a very long time; at least since Old English. But its meaning contains a surprising little twist.  What you probably think of when you use “again” is repetition; you did something once, and if you do the same thing… Continue reading

Sir Arnold Lunn was a writer who seems to have been better known as a skier. He was knighted in England for his skiing, but not his authorship. He lived from 1888 to 1974, and there’s a monument to him in Mürren, Switzerland where he organized the first world skiing championship in 1931. His father… Continue reading

Jonathan Swift was a writer in the 1600s and 1700s who’s still famous for satire. He wrote Gulliver’s Travels, which nowadays most people think is a children’s story about a guy who somehow ends up in a land full of little tiny people, the Lilliputians. Really, though, the story about the Lilliputians is just one… Continue reading

If you’re interested in ancient tales set in the British Isles, and you’ve already read Beowulf, you might turn to the Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge or the Welsh Mabinogion. There’s a certain structure pretty common to epic stories from thousands of years ago; they’re like super hero comics. There’s someone extraordinary who performs amazing feats,… Continue reading

One of the oddball characters in Alice in Wonderland is the Cheshire Cat. He doesn’t really do much in the story besides grin, and then gradually disappear (except for his grin). Have you ever wondered why a grinning feline would be called a Cheshire Cat? Lewis Carroll could have just invented it — he certainly… Continue reading

If you know someone named Abigail or Andrew, you might want to think twice about whether to share this with them. Those names, you see, have in the past been used to mean different things.  Starting in the 1600s – or possibly earlier – an “abigail” was a maidservant. Nobody is quite sure how this… Continue reading

Literature set in England in the 1700s and 1800s is a good place to find exclamations like “You hare-hearted, milk-livered poltroon!” (1769). It was both a generalized insult and a specific reference to being cowardly. It’s such an apt thing to shout at someone that you still find it in modern works like Mutiny on the… Continue reading