When you’re reading a series of texts chock-full of obscure words and other barely interesting trivia (don’t look at me; I don’t know where you’d find anything like that), you might reasonably ask yourself: “chock-full? What’s a chock, and how can it be full?” The phrase “chock-full” has been around for a very long time. Continue reading

“Autology” is a word that was fairly rare even when it was in use back in the 1600s. It meant self-knowledge, or the study of oneself. Some years later there was also the form “autological” for referring to things having to do with autology. Since Freud didn’t happen across the word, it probably would have Continue reading

A “jitney” is the traditional name for what some cities are starting to call, in a typically oafish, tone-deaf, acronymical sort of way, “PTV”s (for “Private Transit Vehicles”). A jitney (we are not calling them PTVs around here) is a van or similar that’s a privately owned shuttle that operates on a fixed route.  The Continue reading

At various times and places throughout history, it’s been difficult to get your hands on whatever passed for “official” money. It could have been because there just wasn’t any such thing at the time, or because there just wasn’t a means for manufacturing whatever it was supposed to be — usually, but not always, metal Continue reading

For some reason, English has tended to borrow words related to death from French. Not directly related to somebody dying, for the most part — just some possibly unexpected connection to death in general.   The most common example is of course “mortgage”, which is borrowed from French where it means “dead” (mort) “pledge” (gage). Continue reading

Midwinter is the time when people look for more layers of cloth to wear to stave off the cold. Literature and fabric are (ahem) woven together in a number of ways. “Spinning a yarn” can mean “telling a tale”, for one thing. Nobody is quite sure where that phrase came from, but it’s been around Continue reading

Around 1616, Shakespeare finished “As You Like It,” in which Rosalind mentions “Caesar’s thrasonicall bragge of I came, saw, and conquered.” Likewise, Thomas Carte’s “A General History of England,” from 1754, points out that “It is too thrasonical to deserve any credit.” I don’t know what he meant by “it”.  “Thrasonical,” though, is quite clear, Continue reading

It’s pretty conventional, in mainline western-civilization thinking at least, to have a high regard for the combination of knowledge and judgment we’d call “wisdom.” In fact, if you were to rate English words by their positive connotation for most people, “wisdom” would probably come out somewhere near the top of the list. At least so Continue reading