People’s interactions are what drives the evolution of language, and the things that are common in a society tend to be the things that generate new words. The beginnings are often found as slang in a particular segment of the population, then some of the slang is adopted more widely. Incarceration is a more prominent Continue reading

Jonathan Swift was a writer in the 1600s and 1700s who’s still famous for satire. He wrote “Gulliver’s Travels,” which nowadays most people think is a children’s story about a guy who somehow ends up in a land full of little tiny people, the Lilliputians. Really, though, the story about the Lilliputians is just one Continue reading

Word of the day: druthers There’s an English phrase — primarily an Americanism — that you may not have encountered, at least not recently. If I had my druthers, of course, people would still use it all the time, but its use has always tended to be regional (used more in the southern states), and Continue reading

If you’re interested in ancient tales set in the British Isles, and you’ve already read Beowulf, you might turn to the Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge or the Welsh Mabinogion. There’s a certain structure pretty common to epic stories from thousands of years ago; they’re a bit like super hero comics. There’s someone extraordinary who performs Continue reading

It would be pretty unlikely to find a sewer in a sewer, and although a sewer might work in a sewer’s vicinity, if the sewer malfunctioned or ceased working altogether the sewer would almost certainly move to a new location a comfortable distance from the sewer.  What we have there is a perfectly good sentence, Continue reading

As liquids used in cooking go, vinegar is not particularly remarkable. It’s basically diluted acetic acid. The interesting aspect of vinegar is the enormous variety of ways you can make it.  The word “vinegar” came originally from Old French (“van egre”) in the early 1300s. One of the oldest surviving mentions of “vinegar” is from Continue reading

Let’s talk about “proper English.” English is not a centrally-managed language; it’s a dynamic set of conventions, and for the most part as long as you can make yourself understood, it works. But there’s also a set of social assumptions associated with how you use English; an assumption (that’s drummed into many of us in Continue reading

If you know someone named Abigail or Andrew, you might want to think twice about whether to share this with them. Those names, you see, have in the past been used to mean different things.  Starting in the 1600s – or possibly earlier – an “abigail” was a maidservant. Nobody is quite sure how this Continue reading

A word you find once in a while — it seems to be falling in popularity — is recherché. If you want to point out that something is rare, refined, and sought out with great care, while simultaneously implying that you yourself are refined and elegant (and quite possibly a bit pretentious), you’d describe the Continue reading