You can charge forward, charge a battery, charge someone with a responsibility (and then they’re in charge of it), or charge them with a crime (which might lead to them being in charge of nothing at all for a period of time), and if you’re hungry you can charge a meal by using a credit… Continue reading

Words take on new meanings all the time. One of them is terrific. No, I mean one of them is “terrific.” It comes from the Latin word “terrificus,” which means frightening. But of course nowadays if you say something is terrific, you mean it’s marvelous and not frightening at all. Something like, I don’t know,… Continue reading

These days the language we use is full of acronyms. Probably too full; people are so used to acronyms that they sometimes assume that a word that’s not an acronym must be one, so they invent it. When they do that, they’re creating a “backronym.” For example, there’s a test applied to newborn babies to… Continue reading

We’ve had to wait a long time for “wait” to be used the way it is today. You can “wait” for something, meaning to bide your time until an event, you can “wait” on something, such as a table at a restaurant, and you can simply “wait tables.”  “Wait” originated as an old Germanic word… Continue reading

It’s the time of year many folks are confronting the near-term results of their “New Year’s Resolutions.” To actually follow through on them, of course, is another story; it needs sustained gumption. That’s the way it is today, at least. In the past following through on resolutions had very little to do with gumption. This… Continue reading

Words often change meanings over time. This happens in different ways. The word “deer” for example, today means a specific type of animal. But back in Old English, when the same word was “doer,” it meant any kind of animal. “Enthusiasm” changed in the opposite way; it comes from Greek and originally meant something very… Continue reading

The analysis of last week’s barmecidal meals is just a subcategory in a science that is — or at least should be — producing any number of treatises and research programs this time of year: aristology. In spite of the way it sounds, aristology doesn’t have anything to do with Aristotle. It’s the science (or… Continue reading

A word has “vertical symmetry” when you can draw a vertical line in the middle and it’s the same on both sides — this is not quite the same as a palindrome, because it’s not just the same letters; it has to be visual symmetry. For that reason it matters whether the word is all… Continue reading

If you’ve read Jane Austen’s Emma, you may have noticed an odd little detail. Just a single word, in fact. You have to have read the right edition to have seen this, because some modern editions have changed the word in the mistaken belief that Austen herself made a mistake. But she didn’t. The word… Continue reading