In the early 1700s, you could do something — just about anything, apparently — “to the nines.” It would have sounded something like this citation from 1719: “How to the nines they did content me.” “To the nines” meant really good, to the highest point, nearing perfection. Unfortunately people’s ability to do most things that Continue reading

These days, “paraphernalia” is just another word for “stuff”. Look around you; almost no matter where you are you’ll see some paraphernalia. It wasn’t always this way, you know. Not that humans haven’t tended to surround themselves with the flotsam and jetsam of the acquisitive behaviors they inherited from an ancient line of great apes Continue reading

Curses, foiled again! Aluminum is a metal we encounter many times per day, which might raise an interesting question: why is it called “aluminium” in England and “aluminum” in the US? It’s not just a matter of an idiosyncratic pronunciation of “aluminum.” In England and the US the spelling shifts to match the pronunciation. It Continue reading

Most people are generally aware of volts, a measure of electricity named after Alessandro Volta. Another electrical measure is the ohm. That was named after Georg Ohm. And amps, or amperes, are named after André-Marie Ampere. Perhaps you see a pattern here. Measures and standards established in the past two or three centuries are often Continue reading

There’s something about the color blue that’s a little different from other colors. I’m not sure what it is, but for some reason you can find more weird references to “blue” than any other color. Here are just a few of them. “Blue murder” is an expression from the 1800s that means a cry of Continue reading

A “hypocorism” is a pet name or familiar name. “Jimmy” for “James” or “Betty” for “Elizabeth.” “Hypocorism” probably needs a pet name of its own. It’s one of the rarest words in English (and that’s saying something). It was included in the 1899 edition of the OED, and classified as “rare” even then. The OED, Continue reading

Some writers have contributed enormously to English. Shakespeare, of course, is the one everybody thinks of. John Milton added even more words than Shakespeare. And don’t forget about Charles Dickens! Dickens usually wrote about working-class people in 1800s England. His characters were often poorly educated and communicated in slang, and some of what Dickens contributed Continue reading

It used to be the case that you’d “convince” someone that, for example, apples tasted better than oranges, but you’d “persuade” them to, for example, bring you an apple. That is, “convince” and “persuade” used to have different meanings; you would “convince” someone “of” something, or “that” something was true, and you’d “persuade” someone “to” Continue reading

Pardon me if this is tedious, but one of the interesting, or possibly maddening, things about the study of rhetoric is its inherent contradictions. Not so much that the rules of rhetoric disagree with one another, but for a field that’s all about improving your communication, it tends to be couched in obscure, hard-to-remember terminology Continue reading

Avast, me hearties! Every trade, craft, and endeavor that’s complex enough to warrant specialized skills and tools also generates its own jargon, as practitioners invent ways to communicate with one another about things that wouldn’t necessarily mean anything to anyone else. You could make an excellent case that for centuries, the most complex human activity Continue reading