A perfectly reasonable news story might include something like this: “The report stated ‘my friend wanted me to sick my dog on them but I wouldn’t…’[sic].” What it means is that the friend recommended commanding the doc to attack, the dog owner misspelled “sic,” and the news reporter wanted to make it clear with [sic] 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

In his 1985 book “The Superior Person’s Book of Words”, Peter Bowler includes this example of an insult: “Sir, you are an apogenous, bovaristic, coprolalial, dasypygal, excerebrose, facinorous, gnathonic, hircine, ithyphallic, jumentous, kyphotic, labrose, mephitic, napiform, oligophrenial, papuliferous, quisquilian, rebarbative, saponaceous, thersitical, unguinous, ventripotent, wlatsome, xylocephalous, yirning zoophyte.” As you’ve probably noticed, that sentence is Continue reading

Thanks mostly to air travel, it’s not unusual to meet a Brazilian, or a Pakistani or even a Canadian. 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 Continue reading

How about some breakfast? After a good eight or so hours of sleep, many people are ready to pull up a chair to the groaning board for a surfeit of collops. Er, that is, many people are ready to sit at the dining room table to eat a good breakfast of bacon and eggs. “Collops” 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

Orlando was a Medieval literary character. Also known as Roland, he was a paladin (knight) in Europe around 700 to 800 CE. That was the time that Charlemagne was founding his empire and battling the Saracens. The term “saracen” comes from Greek and Roman writing, where it referred to people who lived in the Arabian Continue reading

In the mid 1800s, Samuel Beeton was a successful publisher in England. He published the first version of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in the UK, and he also created several successful periodicals, including the “Boy’s Own Magazine” and “Beeton’s Christmas Annual” — which was the first magazine to publish one of Arthur Conan Doyles Sherlock Holmes Continue reading

A “lodge” is a number of things, from a shelter to a hut to a seasonal house to an inn. If it’s an inn, that implies an innkeeper. But unless the quality of service in past centuries was particularly abysmal, why, when we have complaints, is it customary to “lodge” them? “Lodge” appeared in English Continue reading

For an old North American colloquial word that started showing up in the 1800s, “foofaraw” has a surprisingly robust entry in the Oxford English Dictionary. “Foofaraw” originated in the western US, and at first meant fussy, vain, or gaudy. It was carried back to England and appeared in “Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine” in 1848: “Them white Continue reading