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

If you write an academic paper, you include an “abstract;” a brief synopsis of the entire work. If you’re in business, you might work hard on an “elevator pitch” — a brief abstract of the product or service you’re trying to push, timed so you can deliver the whole thing while trapped in an elevator… Continue reading

There are quite a few people sick right now. Some of them probably have “the flu” — and it occurred to me, doesn’t it seem like “the flu” is a strange name for a disease? The real story is even stranger than you might think. “Flu” is short for “influenza,” which is the full name… Continue reading

When you’re in the process of using some words — or even sometimes just when you’re looking at them — they look misspelled even though they’re not. There’s something about those words that’s just awkward. One good example is “awkward” — a “K” in between two “W”s?? That combination is certainly unusual, apparently there’s only… Continue reading