Aftermath and its kin
My story today is about several words referring to aftermath. All of them have a rather confusing sound shape.
In and out of the box
Today’s story is about boxing (that is, about the word box).
Spelling bee is back. So am I
Spelling Bee is back.
Restive people never rest
Some parts of the story I am going to tell can be found in most dictionaries, but it is the attempts to connect a few distant dots that may be interesting to those who wonder “where words come from.”
Is there an L in both?
My grandmother was one of those speakers who had an “r” in the word wash, pronouncing it “warsh”. For her, the nation’s capital was “Warshington”, D.C., and the vegetable was a “squarsh.”
Much hubbub about very little
Soon after the blog Oxford Etymologist came into existence on March 5, 2006 (more than twenty years ago!), I wrote a post on the word hubba-hubba.
Tearing apart a book
For several years, I taught a course on the history of publishing.
Sit thee down, sorrow!
It is easier, following Shakespeare, to tell sorrow to sit down than to discover where the word sorrow came from.
Hogs, hedges, hedgehogs, and BA’s
About a year ago (to be exact, on February 19, 2025), I discussed the origin of some obscure idioms, the hardest of which was to go the whole hog, though a hog on ice also makes one wonder.
Unabridged: some thoughts on a new book about dictionaries and words
Unabridged refers to the title of Webster’s great dictionary. The author of the book, published by Grove Atlantic Monthly Press (New York) in October 2025, is Stefan Fatsis.
An etymological hamburger
My thanks are to Keith Ritchie, who in his comment on the previous post noted that in Scotland, trousers are still called breeches. Unintentionally, today’s word also begins with the letter b, as the italicized part of the title indicates, but it has nothing to do with clothes.
Implicit negation is easy to miss
One of the odder bits of language use is the phenomenon of overnegation, or misnegation.
Endless trouble with breeches
The trouble begins with the pronunciation of the word breeches. Why does breeches (seemingly so, in the US) often rhyme with riches, rather than reaches?
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.