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Academic Insights for the Thinking World
When I was growing up, I read Paul de Kruif’s book Microbe Hunters so many times that I still remember some pages by heart. Two chapters in the book are devoted to Pasteur. The second is called “Pasteur and the Mad Dog.” A book about great word hunters would similarly enthral the young and the old.
Ms. Melissa Mizel found my post for July 29, 2009, on the ethnic slur Sheeny “Jew” and sent me her idea about the etymology of this ugly word.
Noah Webster (1758-1843) knew spree and included it in the first edition of his dictionary. He defined spree as “low frolic” and branded it as vulgar.
The Oxford Etymologist responds to readers comments on his most recent blog post topics.
The origin of the word blatherskite ~ bletherskate “foolish talk; foolish talker” is supposedly secure. The Oxford Etymologist investigates…
Why do so many words beginning with sn- evoke unpleasant associations? The Oxford Etymologist answers a reader’s question.
The Oxford Etymologist is out of hibernation and picks up where he left off in mid-December. It may be profitable to return to the origin of “star”, but from a somewhat broader perspective.
Both “thank” and “give” deserve our attention! And it is those two outwardly unexciting words that I’ll offer today as part of our etymological feast.
Both “thank” and “give” deserve our attention! And it is those two outwardly unexciting words that I’ll offer today as part of our etymological feast.
A bit more is known about the origin of the words thaw and dew than about ice and snow. They are less impenetrable than those two, but they also contain riddles.
In this blog post, the Oxford Etymologist explores the origin of “dear” and the development of the various senses of the word.
In this blog post, the Oxford Etymologist revisits the word “bodkin” and its kin.
Etymologists often deal with a group of words that seem to be related, and yet the nature of the relationship is hard or impossible to demonstrate. Such groups are particularly instructive to investigate. I have long been interested in a possible connection between “limp” (adjective), “limp” (verb), and “lump.”
Impulses behind word formation never change. This statement surprised one of our readers. However, if we assume that most “natural” words are, at least to some degree, sound-symbolic and/or sound-imitative (onomatopoeic), such monosyllabic complexes as kob, kab, keb, kub, kid, kat, and their likes must have arisen again and again in the course of language history, even if every time they were tied to different objects.
“Kid” has a few relatives outside English but in an English text it appeared only around 1200, in a poem so strongly influenced by the language of the Scandinavians that the fact of borrowing is incontestable: “kid” is an import from Danish.
Marley was dead, to begin with, as all of us know. Likewise, the origin of the word Harlequin is controversial, to begin with. Henry Cecil Wyld’s excellent dictionary, to which I often refer, says that all ideas about the etymology of Harlequin are mere speculations. This is not true and was not quite true even […]