Tag: etymology
There are 119 posts.
What is the ‘a-’ in ‘alive’?
‘It’s alive!’ we popularly exclaim of the vivification of Frankenstein’s monster. But once animated, the creature doesn’t have alife or isn’t aliving. Dr Frankenstein gave the creature life, we would say. He made it living. The -live, and its connection to life and to live, is clear, so what is that a- doing in alive? […]
more
Is almond milk really milk?
In recent weeks, you may have come across energetic debates about whether almond milk and other dairy-free milks live up to their name. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has called into question the legitimacy of such products’ claim on the appellation, and now the answer to the question ‘Got milk?’ could very well […]
more
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 […]
more
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. […]
more
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 […]
more
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 […]
more
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 […]
more
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 […]
more
