You hear — usually in competing media — about “tabloid journalism” and “the tabloids.” But doesn’t “tabloid” seem like a weird word for a kind of newspaper? It is — and it originally meant something very different. It all started back in 1880 in London. Henry Wellcome started a business with Silas Burroughs: Burroughs Wellcome… Continue reading

An omen is a sign or portent about some future happening. It might be a good omen or it might be a bad omen — the word “omen” is neutral. But if “omen” is neutral, why does “ominous,” which is simply something foretold by an omen, always have a negative connotation? Whatever the reason, this… Continue reading

You go to the post office to mail a letter. Your mail is delivered by a postal worker, who works for the Post Office, and might drive a mail truck. There are publications called things like The New York Post, others called The Daily Mail, and some that cover all the bases like The Post… Continue reading

“Redoubtable” is a bit of an odd word. It looks like it ought to mean somebody or something you doubted before and now you realize you should doubt again. For example, you might expect to use it this way: “in spite of my worry about whether that bridge was safe, I made it across. But… Continue reading

A “schooner” is both a kind of ship and a kind of beer glass. Nobody really seems to know which came first. For that matter, nobody really seems sure where the word came from in the first place.  Mysterious origins aside, serving beer in “schooners” has a fairly complicated history in England. It seems there… Continue reading

You can be overwhelmed, and since the 1950s you can also be underwhelmed. But it’s been quite a long time since you — or anything else — has been simply whelmed. Although in fact, people haven’t been whelmed all that often.  “Whelm” used to be a common word; it was used in medieval England to… Continue reading

A palindrome is a word or phrase that reads the same backwards and forwards. Some examples are the words “repaper” and “aibohphobia” (which is the fear of palindromes). There are also the phrases “madam, I’m Adam,” “a man, a plan, a canal: Panama,” and “was it a car or a cat I saw?” There’s another… Continue reading

Somebody who enjoys having a privilege has some sort of special right or favor; an advantage in some area, whether they deserve it or not. “Privileges” are generally associated with the society you live in, and the idea goes way, way back to some pretty ancient societies. So does the word — but its history… Continue reading

Christmas is just recently past, and who the dickens do we think of at Christmas? Fast as the dickens, Charles Dickens comes to mind! The various “dickens” phrases, though, have nothing to do with Charles himself; they predate him by quite a lot. Shakespeare used one in “The Merry Wives of Windsor”: “I cannot tell… Continue reading

You can find the most obscure words in dictionaries. Well, obviously, you can find them because that’s where they are defined — but what I mean this time is that when you’re reading a definition of a perfectly common word, sometimes that’s where you run into some pretty unusual ones. For example, take this definition… Continue reading