When you’re just waking up, you’re often in a unique mental state. You’re still half asleep, and whatever nutty thing you were just dreaming about is starting to slip away, but for a little while it still makes a kind of sense.  There’s also a mental state you might enter as you fall asleep; you’re… Continue reading

The first word in an English dictionary is often “aardvark”. But what about the last one? That depends on the dictionary. In many cases it’s “zymurgy,” which is fermentation, such as in making beer or wine. The American Homebrewers Association, which is “dedicated to empowering home brewers to make the best beer in the world,”… Continue reading

When you’re musing, daydreaming, or generally relaxing in an aimless sort of way, you might say that you’re “whiling away the time”. But you might instead say — and back in the day you could have been more likely to say — you’re “wiling away the time.” “While” began to be used as a verb… Continue reading

People remember how their neighbors act toward them and others. Particularly if you live in a village, you know who’s generous and kind, and you also know who’s a tightwad. In the case of the scrooge, you might also call them a nithing, a shut-purse, a chinch, a hayne, a nigon, or a pinchbeck.  Well,… Continue reading

The Latin word for shadow is “umbra,” and it shows up a number of places in English. The first place it shows up, although maybe not the first place people nowadays would think of, is the actual English word “umbra.” It’s not necessarily a literal shadow; one usage of “umbra” means ghost — either a… Continue reading

Thanks mostly to air travel, it’s not unusual to meet someone from practically any country on earth. You may have even met a Padanian. But you won’t find Padania on a map, in an atlas, or in the United Nations. That’s because it’s the name of a nation that doesn’t exist. But people really live… Continue reading

There’s something out of kilter about the way we use the word “kilter.” The word’s first appearance in print (in modern form) was around 1600. For about a century before that it was “kelter.” Both kilter and its immediate predecessor “kelter” mean “in good order or good condition.” But various dialects of English have had… Continue reading

Back in the 1800s, the name “Maria” was roughly as common as it is today, but it was pronounced “mah-RYE-ah” instead of what’s common today, “mah-REE-ah.” We still use the old pronunciation, but only when the name is spelled with an “h:” “Mariah.” But if you were in New York City around the 1830s, and… Continue reading

The habitual habiliments of nuns are habits. “Habit”, meaning the uniform of a Catholic nun, is not related to the word “habiliment” (which means clothing), even though it sounds like it might be. Instead, a nun’s “habit” is short for “habitual” because they wear the same outfit all the time. You might wonder why the… Continue reading

It all started in…well, it’s pretty difficult to pin down a specific point where it all started. It could have been in 1800, when Thomas Wedgewood was the first to produce an image by exposing paper treated with silver nitrate to light. Or maybe it was George Eastman, who patented the the “roll of film”… Continue reading