Pay attention, if you can, without batting an eye. That is, don’t play baseball with your eyelids. No, wait, that’s not right. Don’t flap your eyelids like bat wings…er…but that’s not how bats fly, as far as I know. What I mean is…well never mind that; let’s figure out what’s going on with “batting eyes.” Continue reading

If you have a “kitchen with all the bells and whistles,” you have all the accessories and appliances that most people can think of — but even without them, it’s still a kitchen. “Bells and whistles” can be found in practically any field. Here’s an unusual application from 2010: “One would think that most chief Continue reading

There’s something out of kilter about the way we use the word “kilter.” The word’s first appearance in print was around 1600, and 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 different meanings Continue reading

“A sophistiocal rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign an opponent and glorify himself.” That’s what Benjamin Disraieli said about William Gladstone in 1878.  Decades before Disraeli and Gladstone rose to prominence Continue reading

In 1710, Jonathan Swift declared that “…our Language is extremely imperfect; that its daily Improvements are by no means in proportion to its daily Corruptions; and the Pretenders to polish and refine it, have chiefly multiplied Abuses and Absurdities; and, that in many Instances, it offends against every Part of Grammar.” He made his declaration Continue reading

A shipping agent, particularly if employed by a company like UPS, arrives dressed in livery. If you check the license plate on their vehicle, in some cases it says “livery.” “Livery,” which has nothing to do with “liver,” is from the French word “leveré.” It was delivered into English sometime in the 1300s, and has Continue reading

If you live near (or visit) the ocean, you’ve probably paid at least a bit of attention to the tides. But there are also other kinds of tides, like “Yuletide” for the Christmas season — and those tides came first. Sort of.  “Tide” originally came from German (“tidiz”) and didn’t at first have anything to Continue reading

There was a sort of dictionary in the late 1500s, the Worlde of Wordes, that included this definition: “Balchi, a..roguish, gibbrish word, vsed for money.” Whatever kind of money “balchi” was has been lost to history, as has the word “balchi”, but the entry did, at least, include one of the first appearances of “gibbrish”. Clearly the Continue reading