“The exception proves the rule” is repeated often enough that most people have probably heard it. On the face of it, it seems to mean that finding an exception to a rule provides proof that the rule is correct. Or maybe that the rule is in effect. Or something. Maybe it doesn’t make any sense… Continue reading

US states all have nicknames. It’s not clear why a state needs a nickname, and some of them, like New Mexico’s (“the land of enchantment”) sound like the product of a marketing meeting in the state capital. Many of the nicknames come from some aspect of the history of the state — or even the… Continue reading

Oh…K The letter K is somewhat underused in English. Its sound is often usurped by a hard C and even, in some cases, X. The K section of dictionaries is one of the thinner chapters. There are nevertheless some interesting words lurking in there. One of the best is also one of the most obscure,… Continue reading

The Victorian Era, at least when it’s depicted in fiction, boasts any number of charming eccentrics; generally upper-class British gentlemen enjoying, shall we say, “interesting” hobbies. Besides current steampunk-genre characters, Philias Fogg (who traveled around the word in 80 days) and Caractacus Potts (who built Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, the magic car) are a couple of good examples. … Continue reading

In 1616 (or thereabouts), Shakespeare included this in his play Coriolanus: “You must enquire your way.” Then in 1633, Joseph Hall wrote a book (with one of those absurdly long 17th century titles), in which he wrote: “To inquire my interpretation of this dreame.” Ever since, some people have been using “enquire” where others think it ought to be “inquire,”… Continue reading

In 1876 Mortimer Collins referred to “The dusty and deliquescent pedestrian.” In 1845, Charles Darwin noted “Those salts answer best for preserving cheese which contain most of the deliquescent chlorides.” In 1874 Mordecai Cubitt Cooke pointed out that “It is very difficult to observe the structure of the hymenium, on account of its deliquescent nature.” And in 1866, in a textbook… Continue reading

When you’re “stumped”, you’re stopped in your metaphorical tracks by a puzzle, a conundrum, something you can’t immediately figure out. And various things can leave a stump when the main part of it is removed, the best example being what’s left in the ground when a tree is cut down.  “Stump” came (in the 1300s)… Continue reading

Etymologists try to discover the origins of just about every word they come across. Sometimes, though, their efforts come to nothing but a fiasco. In fact you could say that’s about happened in trying to figure out the origin of “fiasco.”  “Fiasco” comes from Italian, where it has a perfectly straightforward meaning: a bottle or… Continue reading

The German inventor Friedrich Wilhelm Gustav Bruhn came up with a device, in 1891, that measured the distance of a short trip in a carriage. It took only 8 years for Gottlieb Daimler, another German inventor, to install the device — a taximeter — in the Daimler Victoria, which was the world’s first real taxicab… Continue reading

Around the mid 1600s somebody in Scotland thought it would be fun to organize a group into two teams, get a ball, give everybody a curved stick to hit the ball with, and make a game of it. It was a little like field hockey, but that’s not what they called it. What they did… Continue reading