Here’s an English-language oddity; you can utter words, and the words you utter can be utter nonsense! That’s right, “utter” and “utter” are utterly different words.  Well, maybe not utterly different. They are different words, but they come from the same source: the Old English word “uttera,” which was the adjective form of “ut” (by Continue reading

A few centuries ago you probably would have worn weeds. Not that people were wandering around wrapped in thistle leaves — “weed” used to mean a garment, like this reference from the 1400s: “I am wrappyd in a wurthy weed.” It’s a very old word that came from the predecessors to Old English: Old Frisian, Old Continue reading

“Hypercorrection” is the tendency to take a grammatical rule (sometimes a real rule, sometimes imaginary) and extend it via a mistaken analogy. I’m sure you’ve encountered this. It’s behind the idea of changing “doubtless” (a perfectly good word) to “doubtlessly” (not a word), and when you have a word like “ignoramus,” pluralizing it as “ignorami” Continue reading

The year is edging toward summer, the season for blockbuster movie releases. One of the seasons, at least; another raft of the things shows up around Christmastime. Take a look at the Hollywood movies of years ago, though, and you’ll notice that the business has changed drastically. In the 1920s and 1930s, studios cranked out Continue reading

It’s pretty common in English to use a word in a different way than its “part of speech” suggests. That is, using a verb as a noun, or a noun as a verb, etc. We can get away with this and still be understood because English sentences generally provide plenty of contextual clues so you Continue reading

Possibly the most famous piece of exercise equipment ever is the dumbbell. It’s the iconic thing used in illustrations and cartoons; two heavy weights on the ends of a bar. Just a glimpse of it evokes weightlifting, exercise, gyms, and the like. Except…it’s nothing at all like a bell, so what’s with the name? The Continue reading

English tends to have plenty of extra words and phrases for common things. There are loads of synonyms for “money”, for example, and money is certainly something commonplace. Something else you’re likely to encounter repeatedly — sometimes even in the course of a single day — is scolding. Or, if you prefer, rebuking, criticizing, giving Continue reading

“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