These days it’s a fairly low-level hacker exploit to open and read emails intended for somebody else. That sort of thing used to be a bit more difficult, at least in terms of physical skills.  The way you’d protect a document a couple millennia ago was to apply a seal, probably made of molten wax Continue reading

The New York Times used to have a blog called “The Lede.” They shut it down around 2014, I think (you might say they “buried” The Lede), but not before the blog resurrected a word from the 1600s by using this headline: “Canada Bars ‘Infandous’ British Politician, Journalists Reach for Dictionaries.” The reporters in question Continue reading

Literature set in England in the 1700s and 1800s is a good place to find exclamations like “You hare-hearted, milk-livered poltroon!” (1769). It was both a generalized insult and a specific reference to being cowardly. It’s such an apt thing to shout at someone that you still find it in modern works like “Mutiny on the Continue reading

If you’re shopping for clothes, one option might be something made of “gabardine.” The dictionary says it’s a “firm, tightly woven fabric of worsted, cotton, polyester, or other fiber, with a twill weave,” which unfortunately does absolutely nothing to ensure that I’d be able to look at a coat and say “oh, that’s made of Continue reading

In modern English, you can usually add “-ly” to a word to use it in a slightly different way. That is, if there’s something you do most of the time — it’s your “usual” practice — then you could also say you do that thing “usually.”  This goes back to Old English, except that where Continue reading

It’s all the same to us now, but more than a thousand years ago, Old English imported the Old Norse word “same.” It’s a word you probably use every day, but I’ll bet you wouldn’t have predicted that its actual definition is pretty long. It starts out “the ordinary adjectival and pronominal designation of identity…” 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

It’s slightly ironic that English has so many words for “not so many words.” Someone who prefers to keep their verbal expressions to a minimum could be called “terse”, “brief”, “taciturn”, “curt”, “succinct”, “trenchant”, “pithy”, “laconic”, “brusque”, “gruff”, “brief”, ‘abrupt”, “short”, “bluff”, or — and this is probably the best one, even though nowadays it’s Continue reading