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

The Antarctic Mystery with Another Antarctic Mystery In 1897 Jules Verne wrote An Antarctic Mystery. It’s a two-volume novel that is a sort of a sequel to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Sequels are pretty common, of course, but in this case Verne’s novel was a sequel to a book written by… Continue reading

Old joke: “there are no roads in the City of London”. (The City of London is relatively small, ancient, and not the same as “London” itself). The joke is true; there’s not a single passageway there called a “road” — because by the time “road” entered English, every similar thing in the City of London… Continue reading

Some English words exist only as what sound like negative forms, like “incognito.” You never hear about anyone going around “cognito,” after all. But there are also some that were originally positive words, then gained a negative form, then the positive form faded out of use leaving us with only…for example…“ineffable.”  Something that’s “ineffable” can’t… Continue reading

In Hampshire, England, there’s a park called the New Forest that’s not very new at all. It goes back to William the Conqueror (who was in charge 1066-1087), and was a “royal forest.” In the Domesday Book in 1086, it was called “Nova Foresta.” It was used for royal hunts — of deer, for example… Continue reading

Up until about the 1920s, if you were a well-dressed person, you’d often wear “spats” over your shoes. Spats were cloth covers for the tops of shoes, extending up to the ankle. In some accounts, King George V of England was partly responsible for changing the style away from spats; in 1926 he began appearing… Continue reading

Most glass beverage bottles nowadays are molded with screw threads so you can twist the metal cap off with your fingers. But some — particularly beer bottles — still come with metal caps crimped onto the top. Those caps have a name: they’re “crown corks.” They were invented in 1892 in Baltimore, and not only… Continue reading

Flimflam is misleading nonsense. In other words it’s humbug, bunkum, claptrap, poppycock, balderdash, bilge, hooey, malarkey, blatherskite, twaddle, rigamarole. (Hey, I did say “other words.”) But “flimflam” is the word of the day, so we’ll skip the tommyrot and get right to it. It’s an older word than you might guess, dating back to the… Continue reading

When something is “phony” (or, in Commonwealth countries, “phoney”), it’s fake, or if a person, insincere. J.D. Salinger captured it precisely in Catcher in the Rye: “they had this headmaster, Mr. Haas, that was the phoniest bastard I ever met in my life.” There’s a myth that “phony”, probably because it sounds like “phone” as… Continue reading

“I think,” said Corney, “we’d better get him up to bed at once?” “Do what yow like,” replied aunt Ann. “It makes no odds to me: I’ll ha’ nothing to do with him! — I’ll have no truck with a tocksicated man.” If you “have no truck with” someone (or something), that means you want… Continue reading