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

Not too long after Izaak Walton wrote a heartfelt guide to fishing in The Compleat Angler in 1653, George Gascoigne penned The Noble Arte of Venerie or Hunting in 1575. Both books were what today we might call how-to guides. Among the handy pointers Gascoigne dispensed was this: “There is difference betweene the fewmet of… Continue reading

People who compile reference books like dictionaries have to be on the lookout, not just for mountweazels inserted into other references as copyright bait, but also for simple mistakes. After all, if you’re going to write your own dictionary, some of the best places to start are other dictionaries. But what if one of them… Continue reading

An occasional Halloween prank in the US is “egging” where kids throw eggs at a house or a car. Their friends, you might imagine, are busy “egging them on.” But egging someone on, even when you’re egging them on about egging, has nothing to do with eggs. Well, I mean, in that particular case I… Continue reading

Up until about the 1970s, a movie that was a goofy, possibly slapstick comedy would be advertised as “zany” and “madcap.” Both of those words are less common in recent decades, but still around.  By coincidence, both words appeared in English around the 1500s, even though that century isn’t generally remembered as a golden era… Continue reading

It’s all the same to us now, but more than a thousand years ago, Old English imported the Old Norse word “same.” It’s a word you probably use every day, but I’ll bet you wouldn’t have predicted that its actual definition is pretty long. It starts out “the ordinary adjectival and pronominal designation of identity…”… Continue reading

If you stop and think about a common, everyday expression, sometimes what you think is that it makes no sense. For example, by and large means “generally” or “for the most part.” The phrase has been around at least since the early 1700s (“Tho’ he trys every way, both by and large, to keep up with… Continue reading

It’s pretty conventional, in mainline western-civilization thinking at least, to have a high regard for the combination of knowledge and judgment we’d call “wisdom.” In fact, if you were to rate English words by their positive connotation for most people, “wisdom” would probably come out somewhere near the top of the list. At least so… Continue reading