You hear it all the time: “third-world countries,” or “that’s a first-world problem.” But you hardly ever hear about the second world. And oddly enough, even though the whole idea of categorizing nations as first-, second-, and third-world hasn’t been around all that long, today’s phrases have already shifted in meaning from their original usage.… Continue reading

An oversight of oversight Having oversight of something means you’re in charge of it, or managing it. It’s a pretty old word, and has been used to mean some form of authority or supervision for centuries. Queen Margaret of Anjou used “oversight” in this way in a letter from about 1421: “Send sum trusty man… Continue reading

Gardens are shut down this time of year, but you’ve got the whole winter to plan to fit out your plot with “Cotswold stone retaining walls; vaguely Spanish wrought iron gates; crazy paving… colored yellow, green, and pink; irregular ponds of pale blue fibreglass fed by streams of impossible source; gnomes, fairies, and animals, usually… Continue reading

If you ease the burden of something, you might say that you “lightened” it. If you make something less messy, you’ve “tidied.” But not “tidy-ened.” When you make something easier to understand, you’ve “clarified” — but not “clearened” or “claried.” And for that matter, if you go around your room straightening and correcting things, you’ve… Continue reading

In the last century BCE there was a small kingdom on the southern edge of the Black Sea, called “Pontus.” They fought several wars with Rome, but in later centuries the kingdom was chiefly remembered for Mithridates IV, the king of Pontus. Courtly life in Pontus being what it was (not very nice), Mithridates was… Continue reading

When something is “pertinent,” it’s relevant. The heat-regulating system in your oven, for example, is pertinent to how well your cake comes out when you’re baking. The word is from the late 1300s (the Middle English era), and made its way to English via French. Its ultimate root is Latin: “pertinare,” which means the same… Continue reading

For your reading pleasure (or at least to occupy some time you could be spending more profitably elsewhere), here is a word of the day episode made from scratch.  “Made from scratch” means “not made from a prepackaged mix.” But where does that meaning of “scratch” come from? It’s certainly not from the “scratch” that… Continue reading

“Sweet Molly Malone” is an Irish song first published in 1876 (in Boston, not Ireland) about a young woman who was a fishmonger in Dublin. She might have been a real person, although nobody really knows. But what she sold was real: “cockles and mussels, alive, alive-o,” as the song goes.  Cockles are shellfish, like… Continue reading

If you’re not sure what to have for breakfast — waffles with syrup or waffles with whipped cream — and you go back and forth, you might be waffling about waffles. You could also wax lexiphanic about your choice, eloquently and loquaciously holding forth about how it feels to be caught between two options and… Continue reading

Since we’re well into winter in the northern hemisphere, what could be more appropriate than diving into the phrase “shiver me timbers”? Well…ok, it’s possible there could be one or two more appropriate things. Anyway, “shiver me timbers” may well be well known today because of movies about pirates, starting with the 1950 Disney film… Continue reading