Word of the day: heyday
I have sometimes wondered about the word heyday, Might it have something to do with haying, with jolly rustics turning work into play in the fields?
Dictionaries laugh in my face.
Gibbous
What’s it mean?
Word of the day: tire
Why, our household wondered, are those things on cars and trucks and bicycles called tires?
Word of the day: oaktag
What it is, and where the word comes from.
Butter No Parsnips
An excellent podcast series for those who like words and rabbit holes.
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Word of the day: lukewarm. Now with its own faucet.
Word of the day: lukewarm
The directions that come with a Waterpik say to use lukewarm water. Whence lukewarm ?
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Brew, broth, bread, and beer.
Brew, broth, bread
Oh the things we talk about at the breakfast table. They’re related words.
Groats, grits, grout, Grote
Words and where they come from.
Brain food
What’s a saveloy?
A word of a day: gamut
An amazing origin.
Errand, errant
I wondered: could errand and errant be related? Isn’t a knight errant, roving about, kinda like on an errand sort of, maybe?
Rudolph and reindeer, explained
“Quick etymology.”
Vet
I finally thought to look up a word that’s long puzzled me: the verb vet. I had anticipated some weirdness in its past — perhaps a Latin phrase about trustworthiness for which it’s a one-syllable stand-in? Alas, the origin is disappointingly obvious, though not so obvious that I would have guessed it.
Word of the day: coleslaw
From the Dutch.
Secret, secretary
Ammon Shea: “When I learned that secretary meant “one privy to a secret” during the fourteenth century I was utterly delighted.”
Bastard file
I just used such a file to make a door accommodate a new knob. But why is it called a bastard file?
Words, phrases, etymological cages
Sir Ernest Gowers, or a second- or third-generation reviser, writing about what has come to be called the etymological fallacy, the mistaken idea that a word’s present meaning must be related to that word’s etymology.
Word of the day: phony
Could “phonein” explain “phony” — something that sounds plausible, but isn’t?
Word of the day: tyke
Yikes, what an etymology
Ballyhoo
I was watching an episode of Ralph J. Gleason's television series Jazz Casual (1962) featuring the singer and pianist Jimmy Rushing, who wa...