Pylimitics

From Piglet to Wilbur to Babe to Animal Farm, pigs play a certain minor (or possibly mid-range) role as characters in English writing. Pigs have been domesticated for many centuries, and they’ve entered the language as well.  The thing is, most pig-related words and idioms don’t seem particularly kind to the pigs. The word “hogwash,”… Continue reading

When you’re musing, daydreaming, or generally relaxing in an aimless sort of way, you might say that you’re “whiling away the time”. But you might instead say — and back in the day you might have been more likely to say — you’re “WILING away the time.” “While” began to be used as a verb… Continue reading

About 35 years ago there was a professor of linguistics at Drew University: Roger Wescott, who happened upon the slang word “oogly” (or at least said he did; not a whole lot of other people seem to have heard of it). “Oogly,” Wescott explained, was a form of “ugly,” and it was used to mean… Continue reading

Word of the day: sophisticated “Sophisticated” means refined, cultured, and even complicated. A “sophisticate” is a person who embodies those qualities. But all this is only recently, in etymological terms. “Sophisticate” meaning a person dates only from the 1920s, and even “sophisticated” was used in our modern sense — and applied to people — starting… Continue reading