Pylimitics

Medical doctors often specialize in a particular area, and those specialties feature English that’s heavily populated with Latin- and Greek-originated words. For example, there might be a “thoracic” specialist focusing on the torso — that specialty comes from “thorax”, which comes from the Greek word for the breastplate part of a suit of armor. An… 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

Eponyms are words that come from someone’s name. “Flack” is an eponym because it came from Gene Flack. “Dickens”, as in the somewhat old fashioned “oh he’s just a little dickens,” is not an eponym; “dickens” was a synonym for “devil” a couple of centuries ago. But “boycott,” refusing to engage in commerce for some… Continue reading

Some time ago — and by “some time” I mean roughly a century and a half and more — if you were going to walk somewhere fairly distant you might say you were going to “ride shank’s mare” or “shank’s pony.” “Shank” means shin, and the expression came out of Scotland sometime in the 1700s.… Continue reading

Guinea pigs are a bit of a puzzle, terminology-wise. They’re rodents, not pigs. They’re not from Guinea, either; they were first found in South America — or rather, their ancestors were; the guinea pigs that are now pets have been domesticated enough that they differ quite a bit from the wild variety. Not quite to… Continue reading