Americana: enter hillbilly. Moby Dick follows
This is a continuation of the previous post, devoted to all kinds of country bumpkins. Hillbilly looks like the most uninspiring word to discuss: it is so obviously made up of hill + billy.
Hobnobbing with a hillbilly
It is unimaginable how many denigrating names people have invented for our breadwinners and shepherds! Those names were, I assume, coined by city dwellers who did not want to soil their hands with earth and manure.
A tortuous journey: the word pamphlet
In English, pamphlet is synonymous with booklet, brochure, but in some other modern European languages, a pamphlet makes one rather think of its synonym lampoon.
Bob Turvey, a student of limericks
I have recently read two books by Bob Turvey: The Secret Life of Limericks (Ithaca, NY, 2024. 286 pp.), and Why Are Limericks Called Limericks: An Etymological Detective Story (Bristol, England: Waldegrave Publishing, 2025. 295 pp.).
This old house and these old houses
Book reviews, like books themselves, come in all shapes and sizes. There are the sometimes inflated rah-rahs on Amazon or Goodreads, or short reviews in Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly, and Choice.
Labor and luck in etymology
The blog is back on track, and I’ll begin where I left off in August. I am now reading two books on the history and etymology of limerick by Mr. Bob Turvey.
The rule of three
I’ve been reading S. Jay Keyser’s fascinating book Play It Again Sam, which (despite its waggish title) is a serious and insightful study of the role of repetition in the verbal, musical, and visual arts.
On reading reviews
Book reviews, like books themselves, come in all shapes and sizes. There are the sometimes inflated rah-rahs on Amazon or Goodreads, or short reviews in Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly, and Choice.
Unexpected words
When I read slowly, I’m a somewhat easily distracted reader. I might ponder an idea, puzzle at a phrasing, or admire elegance and style. Sometimes, though, it is unexpected words that cause me to stop and wonder about their origins.
The truth about the microbiome: what’s real and what isn’t?
What’s really happening with those microbes inside us? Are we really superorganisms or is it all hype? Dr Berenice Langdon reveals the truth about the Microbiome.
“I’m good”
The word good does a lot of work in English. Aside from its garden-variety sense (as in “good game” or “good job” or “good dog”), we find the word has a number of extended uses.
Meet the editors: what we do at conferences
For academics, stepping into the world of scholarly conferences for the first time can feel like crossing the Rubicon. After months (or sometimes years) of what is often a solitary research journey, scholars enter a dynamic ecosystem where subfields collide and converge, and colleagues at every career stage rub shoulders in line for coffee and conversation.
What’s your literary classic Halloween costume? [quiz]
This Halloween, why not let literature dress you?
Symbol swearing with the Grawlix
I miss a lot of things about the decline of paper newspapers, especially the comic strips. The comics were verbal humor with pictures and recurring characters, and the language of the comics provided a window into how spoken language was represented in print.
Let’s stop talking about conspiracy “theories”
A few years ago, I taught an undergraduate course on “Cons, Cults, and Conspiracies Theories,” exploring the connections and parallels among those phenomena.
Your Indo-European beard
It sometimes seems that the greater the exposure of a body part, the greater the chance of its having an ancient (truly ancient!) name.