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Academic Insights for the Thinking World
Superstitions, unlike knowledge, spread quickly. Students’ spelling breaks every instructor’s heart, and we ask ourselves the question: How did so many people from all over the country, come to the unanimous conclusion that occurrence should be spelled occurance? It is, I believe, a huge conspiracy.
Anatoly Liberman’s weekly column.
Oddest English Spellings, Part 5.
Anatoly weights in on Slang.
Monthly Gleanings.
Anatoly Liberman ponders longevity.
The Oxford Eytmologist takes on more words.
The Oxford Eytmologist is at it again…
Some time ago I received a question about the word macabre. This adjective first appeared in Old French, in the phrase dancemacabre. The story begins with the fresco of the Dance Macabre, painted in 1424 in the Church of Innocents at Paris. The English poet and monk John Lydgate knew the fresco.
By Anatoly Liberman It is easy to get used to certain conventions. No characters exist for the initial consonants of the English words shin, chin, and thin, and at an early age we learn that two letters are needed to render them in spelling. In Part 3 of the series “The Oddest English Spellings,” I compared shelf, […]
Only children and foreigners express their surprise when they discover that the verb long does not mean “lengthen” or that belong has nothing to do with longing. When we grow up, we stop noticing how confusing such similarities of form coupled with differences in meaning are.
On August 23, I appeared on the “Midmorning” show on Minnesota Public Radio. Many of you called in with questions, to some of which I could give immediate answers. But, the origin of several words I did not remember offhand and I promised to look them up in my database. Here are my responses.
Many words resemble mushrooms growing on a tree stump: they don’t have common roots but are still related. I will use few examples, because if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. Nothing is known about the origin of cub, which surfaced in English texts only in 1530 (that is, surprisingly late).
Our egalitarian predilections have partly wiped out the difference between “vulgar” and “cool,” and the idea of being judgmental or appearing better educated than one’s neighbor scares the living daylights out of intellectuals. Dictionaries, we are told, should be descriptive, not prescriptive.
While working on my etymological database, I looked through countless old journals and magazines. I especially enjoyed reading the reviews of etymological dictionaries published in their pages. Some were shockingly abrasive, even virulent; others delightfully chatty and unabashedly superficial.
By Anatoly Liberman The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) appeared thanks to the efforts of the Philological Society. Every May the society opened its “anniversary” (that is, annual) meetings with long presidential addresses, which also graced the early volumes of the Transactions of the Philological Society (TPS). Both the society and its transactions are still very […]