When it’s time to teach children the alphabet, in English it goes like this: you learn the names of the letters, then some words that start with those letters. “Ae,” “bee,” cee,” and so on are what English letters are called, of course. Made-up words that generally don’t mean anything else. Learning the alphabet in Continue reading

For centuries, one of the most powerful weapons available to anyone was some kind of sword. Swords appeared in various forms in all sorts of cultures, and the skill of using a sword for fighting was developed to quite a high level. You’d think, in all those years and among all those experts, that the Continue reading

Consider the humble “humble.” “Humble” is a word that’s been part of English since about the 1200s, which is a pretty long time. And in those centuries, “humble” has meant some very different things compared to how we use it now. In a sense, it’s the opposite of “proud.”  That meaning is one of a 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

I love it when a plan comes together People have been planning and scheming for a very long time, and for just as long there have been events, circumstances, and other people who have been thwarting those plans. “Thwart” is an extremely old word — one way to tell is that you find versions of Continue reading

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