Pylimitics

The famous novelist Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton — he’s famous these days for being a bad novelist — wrote, in 1842,  this line in his most famous novel, Paul Clifford: “If Paul’s comrade laughed at first, he now laughed ten times more merrily than ever. He threw his full length of limb upon a neighbouring sofa,… Continue reading

A sort of old-fashioned cheer — it sounds very British, probably because it is —goes like this: “Hip, hip, hooray!” It’s older than you might think. It was first recorded in an 1803 poem with the title (big surprise here) Hip, hip, hurrah. The poem illustrates one thing, at least – while today we generally… Continue reading

A “soliton” is a special kind of wave. While it appears here and there in publications devoted to quantum physics — because it has to do with quantum or quasiparticle propagation — the word also has to do with other kinds of waves, even the traditional kind you see at the beach. “Soliton” is derived… Continue reading

Everybody knows what a “box” is, right? Yup, it’s a type of small evergreen shrub used ornamentally. The word goes back to Old English, where its first known use is from the early 900s in Codex Diplomaticus Aevi Saxonici. The citation is “Of ðere gemear~codan æfsan to ðon readan slo..of ðam treowe to ðere wican… Continue reading

“Abligurition” is an impressively obscure word, so rare that you won’t even find it in most dictionaries. Even in the dictionaries where it does appear (well, okay, the one dictionary where it seems to appear), it’s called obsolete. This is certainly unjustified; after all, even if the word itself is unfamiliar to most people, the… Continue reading