It’s not easy to compile a reference work like a dictionary, encyclopedia, or even a more topical work that provides information about, say, music, or wine. It seems like whenever there’s a task that’s inherently difficult, somebody will try to take a shortcut. And with something like a reference book, the easiest shortcut of all… Continue reading

The people who spoke Old English didn’t have clocks. At least not in the way we think of clocks today, as reliable, consistent devices that tell us precisely what the hour and minute is. Nevertheless, they did understand punctuality. They had a word for it: “seely.” You can even tell that being seely was a… Continue reading

Every once in a while the word “spelunking” shows up. It means “exploring caves,” which is something done by a “spelunker.” It seems pretty strange; there’s really nothing about crawling around inside caves that would suggest a word like “spelunking.”  The modern English word “spelunker” is relatively new; it appeared in the 1940s, and seems… Continue reading

You hear a lot these days about the “gig economy.” It’s the idea that fewer people can find traditional jobs where you have a particular employer who pays you a fairly predictable amount, so they find more temporary ways to earn money. These often involve acting as independent contractors instead of employees. In a “gig… Continue reading

You can get a pretty good idea of the functions of a language by examining its words. This is more than that old saw about “Eskimo having 27 words for ‘snow’”. That was probably apocryphal anyway, but I’m not just talking about nouns. The nouns in a language do, of course, give some insight into… Continue reading

A couple of thousand years ago — well, more than that really — the young people of Greece were notorious for wearing their hair quite long. There was even a Latin word for this: “acersecomes,” which simply meant “a long-haired youth.”  “Acersecomes” is Latin, but it comes from the Greek roots “kome” (hair, particularly the… Continue reading

Here are three interesting words you don’t see every day: “selmelier,” “panjandrum,” and “octothorpe.” The first is a protologism, but not the other two. Those used to be neologisms, but aren’t any more. A “protologism” is a word that somebody coins — maybe for a particular purpose, maybe in the hope that it will become… Continue reading

English borrows from every language it encounters. Most English words, of course, can be traced back to European languages, either from the south (think the ones related to Greek and Latin) or the north (Germanic). But English also has words that come from, of all languages, the Aztecs. This is a bit surprising because Aztec… Continue reading

English does some inconsistent tricks when it comes to numbers. After ten is “eleven” and “twelve”, but then a sequence of “-teens”. So why isn’t “eleven” called something like “oneteen” and twelve “twoteen”? You can find the first clue by checking out the various non-metric measurement systems used (also inconsistently) in English-speaking countries. One foot,… Continue reading

A “bozo,” as lots of people in the US know, is a person who’s not regarded as the most competent or capable of the bunch. Some of this comes from the character “Bozo the Clown.” Bozo was created in the 1940s as a character in a children’s book and a record album kids could listen… Continue reading