The moon has phases, a big construction project can have phases, you might phase in a new lesson plan in school or a new budgeting system in a business, and while that might leave some practitioners unphased, others, disturbed by the changes, would be more correctly described as “fazed.” “Phase” has a long history, and Continue reading

The English language gained a number of odd words in the 1960s. One of them is groovy. Er, that is, one of them is “groovy,” which may or may not be groovy. “Groovy” means cool, apt, pleasing, current, and generally desirable, and if you actually use the term today it evokes people wearing bell-bottom jeans, Continue reading

In 1837 in London, a case came before the court and the following testimony was recorded: “The complainant said that on Saturday morning he was at the plying place at the Tower stairs, when Crouch began to abuse him, and swore he would “cook his goose,” by which he meant he would ruin him, or Continue reading

For some reason, English has tended to borrow words related to death from French. Not directly related to somebody dying, for the most part. Just some possibly unexpected connection to death in general.   The most common example is of course “mortgage,” which is borrowed from French where it means “dead” (mort) “pledge” (gage). Sometimes Continue reading

“I cannot tell what the dickens his name is,” reads a line in Shakespeare’s “Merry Wives of Windsor.” A century later, in 1728, the somewhat less-well-known writer Colley Cibber wrote “The provok’d husband; or, A journey to London,” and included the same exclamation: “The dickens! has this Rogue of a Count play’d us another Trick then?” Another century passed, Continue reading

You’ll often see the word “caucus” in news stories that have to do with the US Congress — the “Republican caucus,” the “Democratic caucus” — and sometimes a senator or representative who’s independent will be described as “caucusing” with one party or the other.  The word is part of the trade jargon of US politics, Continue reading

“Books” were, once upon a time, created as scrolls rather than sets of bound pages (technically called “codexes”). Scrolls have a lot going for them; they can be of any length, and they don’t present any of the issues created by having to shift from one page to the next when you’re reading, or for Continue reading

The original meaning of “parasite” in English was someone who weasels their way into the retinue of a wealthy and/or powerful person and stays there by constant, shameless flattery. That is, somebody who’s unrelentingly gnathonic. At this point you might not entirely appreciate that clarification, since “gnathonic” is so obscure that it’s practically unknown. At Continue reading

A marmot is a small to medium-sized rodent, and in addition to there being an actual animal called a marmot, it’s also sometimes used as a name for a whole family of animals first described in the 1700s by Carl Linnaeus. The formal name of the family is “sciuridae,” which is simply the Latin word Continue reading