In 1863, the “Lady’s Newspaper” of London printed a letter that’s gone down in the annals of insulting texts as a classic. It was from somebody called “J. Hooker”, and although it’s not really known who that might have been, there’s some speculation that it was Joseph Dalton Hooker. He was a well-known biologist of Continue reading

Yankee Doodle, as the story goes, stuck a feather in his cap and called it “macaroni.” Loads of kids in the US learn this song and wonder what the heck the pasta reference is doing there, because it doesn’t seem to make any sense. It doesn’t make any sense nowadays because back in the 1700s Continue reading

An unpleasant, disharmonious noise is called “cacophony”. Although that’s the only word in its family that most people are familiar with, there exists a whole family of English words that (1) mean something unpleasant, and (2) begin with “cac-“. The prefix is pretty straightforward; it comes from the Greek word “kakos” (bad).  Most, but not Continue reading

Words come from lots of different sources, and these sources change over time. Many sources came to exist because of events — for instance, when the Normans invaded England a thousand years ago it proved to be a source of countless new English words. Some sources are slower and have more to do with migration Continue reading

Like the word “good”, “bad” has a very long history. Nobody knows quite where it came from. If it existed in Old English, it didn’t have exactly the same form, but there are several OE words that it MIGHT have come from. The first is not exactly a “word” at all; it’s the name “Badda.” Continue reading

In the early days of automobile design, none of the standards we’re used to had emerged yet. Most very early cars didn’t have steering wheels; you steered them with a lever, which was called a “tiller”.  English has two “tiller” words. The first has to do with farming; a tiller in that sense is either Continue reading

Although print magazines are fading in popularity thanks to web-based versions, they still exist in a multitude of categories, just has they have for over a century. The business model of print magazines has been pretty stable the whole time; most of them make their money by printing advertisements. The key to that, of course, Continue reading

There are people who like to write, there are people who need to write because of their work, and then there are people who are “writative.” The difference is probably something like this: someone who likes to write might keep a journal, but having forgotten to pack their diary for a weekend trip, would simply Continue reading

If you raise a number to its second power, you have the square of the number. If you raise it to the third power, you have the cube. I’m pretty sure most people know that. But here’s an obscure bit of trivia: if you raise a number to its eighth power, what you have is Continue reading

The word “noggin” has a longer history than you might expect for a slang term for your head. When the word is used today, it’s used the way it appeared in “Landfall” in 1951: “Thanks, chum,’ said Vic, ‘You used your noggin.’” Roald Dahl used it, too, in “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar:” “Of Continue reading