Tag: etymology
There are 117 posts.
What in the Word?! The racist roots of ‘bulldozer’
Please note: this blog post discusses language that some readers may find offensive. And you thought the 2016 US presidential election was shocking… Like the 2016 election, the 1876 election between Democrat Samuel J. Tilden and Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was one of just five where the winner of the popular vote, here Tilden, did […]
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What in the Word?! The forlorn ‘lorn’
’Tis better to have lorn and lost than never to have lorn at all. Or so the poet says. Little, lowly lorn. We might say it’s forlorn, a ‘pitifully sad and abandoned’ word in which the vestige of a lost English verb survives. So, let’s give lorn some etymological love, and let’s begin with forlorn. […]
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A new origin for ‘reefer’?
When different words with similar sounds cross paths in a word’s history, the work of etymology can be difficult. For example, the verb hang has several separate, but similar-sounding, antecedents in Old English and Old Norse, among them a strong verb, which means that a change of tense is marked by changing the vowel (as […]
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What in the Word?! The forerunners of ‘harbinger’
The machinery of modern politics is complex. Consider just the role of the humble advance agent, someone who visits a location ahead of the arrival of an important visitor – especially a politician, say, for a campaign rally to sort out all the optics and stagecraft – to make sure all arrangements are sorted. But […]
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What in the Word?! In the ‘tank’
One hundred years ago, Flanders was covered in blood – and mud. At the Battle of Passchendaele (31 July – 6 November, 1917), Allies slogged through a grueling three months and hundreds of thousands of casualties to win control of the area around Ypres, Belgium. Heavy summer rains turned the battlefield into muddy sloughs so […]
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Debunking myths: the real origins of ‘posh’ and ‘tip’
In his pioneering 1755 dictionary, Samuel Johnson focused on words that were, as he put it in an explanatory essay, “used in the general intercourse of life, or found in the works of those whom we commonly style polite writers”. The operative word here is polite, which referred in part to the domains of learning […]
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The etymological march of ‘pride’
June marks many LGBTQ pride celebrations across the globe. But how did the word pride evolve from a condemnation of self-importance to an expression of self-empowerment? Let’s take a look at the history of pride. A ‘proud’ past The word pride has a ‘proud’ past, as it were, in the English language. The Oxford English […]
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Where does ‘the writing is on the wall’ come from?
For nearly four centuries, the phrase ‘the writing is on the wall’ has been used in English to indicate that clear signs of something unfortunate or disastrous have appeared. One of the earliest instances of its use comes from a 1638 text by a Captain L. Brinckmair, which tries to show that reports from across […]
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