When something is “pertinent,” it’s relevant. The heat-regulating system in your oven, for example, is pertinent to how well your cake comes out when you’re baking. The word is from the late 1300s (the Middle English era), and made its way to English via French. Its ultimate root is Latin: “pertinare,” which means the same Continue reading

For your reading pleasure (or at least to occupy some time you could be spending more profitably elsewhere), here is a word of the day episode made from scratch.  “Made from scratch” means “not made from a prepackaged mix.” But where does that meaning of “scratch” come from? It’s certainly not from the “scratch” that Continue reading

“Sweet Molly Malone” is an Irish song first published in 1876 (in Boston, not Ireland) about a young woman who was a fishmonger in Dublin. She might have been a real person, although nobody really knows. But what she sold was real: “cockles and mussels, alive, alive-o,” as the song goes.  Cockles are shellfish, like Continue reading

If you’re not sure what to have for breakfast — waffles with syrup or waffles with whipped cream — and you go back and forth, you might be waffling about waffles. You could also wax lexiphanic about your choice, eloquently and loquaciously holding forth about how it feels to be caught between two options and Continue reading

Since we’re well into winter in the northern hemisphere, what could be more appropriate than diving into the phrase “shiver me timbers”? Well…ok, it’s possible there could be one or two more appropriate things. Anyway, “shiver me timbers” may well be well known today because of movies about pirates, starting with the 1950 Disney film Continue reading

Popular souvenirs of major cities, like New York or Paris, are handheld versions of famous landmarks like the Eiffel Tower or the Statue of Liberty (both, by the way, the products of Gustave Eiffel). But are these things “models” or “replicas?”   “Replica” is a word borrowed from Italian sometime in the 1500s, and its Continue reading

The medical community sometimes tries to suggest that “addiction” should be limited to its clinical sense — that is, it’s not helpful to a discussion of physical addiction to, say, opiates, if it’s also common to say things like “I love chocolate; I’m really addicted,” or “I’m addicted to that new coffee shop.” As almost Continue reading

Here’s a pair of words that have diverged in meaning: “awful” and “awesome.” When you say something is “awful,” you mean it’s bad. I’m not going out today; the weather is awful. But “awesome” is good. Let’s go out and enjoy the awesome weather. Of the two words, “awful” is the older one, dating back Continue reading

An interesting way to look at dictionary definitions is to look at the definition by itself and see whether you can figure out the word it’s attempting to define. For example, if you see “any one of the berries, growing in clusters on a vine, and from the juice of which wine is made,” you Continue reading