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Title cover of "Dangerous Crooked Scoundrels: Insulting the President from Washington to Trump" by Edwin L. Battistella, published by Oxford University Press

Can a word have an existential crisis?

A while back, a philosopher friend of mine was fretting about the adjective “existential.” She was irked by people using it to refer to situations which threaten the existence of something, as when someone refers to climate change as an “existential crisis,” or more commonly, as “an existential threat.”

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Title cover of "Origin Uncertain: Unraveling the Mysteries of Etymology" by Anatoly Liberman

Words related to size, part two: tiny

Now that we know how untrivial the origin of small, little ~ leetle, and wee is (see the post for June 20, 2024), we are fully prepared to examine the puzzling history of tiny. Little pitchers have long ears, and inconspicuous words may have a nearly impenetrable etymology. It is hard to believe how much trouble the adjective tiny has given researchers.

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Title cover of "Origin Uncertain: Unraveling the Mysteries of Etymology" by Anatoly Liberman

Etymological small fry: some words for “size”

Quite recently, the Polish linguist Kamil Stachowski has published a paper “On the Spread and Evolution of pudding” (the source is the journal Studia Linguistica Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis 141, 2024, 117-137).

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Title cover of "Dangerous Crooked Scoundrels: Insulting the President from Washington to Trump" by Edwin L. Battistella, published by Oxford University Press

All about all

One of the quirkier features of the English syntax has to do with the simple word all. All is a quantity word, or quantifier in the terminology of grammarians and logicians. It indicates an entirety of something.

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Title cover of "Origin Uncertain: Unraveling the Mysteries of Etymology" by Anatoly Liberman

More gleanings and a few English sw-words

Before I come to the point, a short remark is due. Some of our readers may have noticed that two weeks ago, they did not receive Wednesday’s post. This happened because of a technical problem, but the post “Some Gleanings and the Shortest History of Bummers,” is available.

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Title cover of "Origin Uncertain: Unraveling the Mysteries of Etymology" by Anatoly Liberman

Pudding all over the world

Quite recently, the Polish linguist Kamil Stachowski has published a paper “On the Spread and Evolution of pudding” (the source is the journal Studia Linguistica Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis 141, 2024, 117-137).

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Title cover of "Origin Uncertain: Unraveling the Mysteries of Etymology" by Anatoly Liberman

Some gleanings and the shortest history of bummers

Every English dictionary with even minimal information on word origins, will tell us that lord and lady are so-called disguised compounds. Unlike skyline or doomsday (to give two random examples), lord and lady do not seem to consist of two parts. Yet a look at their oldest forms—namely, hlāf-weard and hlæf-dīge—dispels all doubts about their original status (the hyphens above are given only for convenience).

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Title cover of "Origin Uncertain: Unraveling the Mysteries of Etymology" by Anatoly Liberman

From rags to riches, or the multifaceted progress of lady

Every English dictionary with even minimal information on word origins, will tell us that lord and lady are so-called disguised compounds. Unlike skyline or doomsday (to give two random examples), lord and lady do not seem to consist of two parts. Yet a look at their oldest forms—namely, hlāf-weard and hlæf-dīge—dispels all doubts about their original status (the hyphens above are given only for convenience).

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Title cover of "Origin Uncertain: Unraveling the Mysteries of Etymology" by Anatoly Liberman

Fink, a police informer

Specialists and amateurs have long discussed fink, and the main purpose of today’s post is to tell those who are not versed in etymology what it takes to study the origin of an even recent piece of slang and come away almost empty-handed.

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Title cover of "Dangerous Crooked Scoundrels: Insulting the President from Washington to Trump" by Edwin L. Battistella, published by Oxford University Press

The word on arithmetic

When we think of genre, it is often in the sense of literature or film. However, rhetoricians will tell us that genre is a concept that includes any sort of writing that has well-defined conventions, such as business memos, grant proposals, obituaries, syllabi, and much more.

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Title cover of "Origin Uncertain: Unraveling the Mysteries of Etymology" by Anatoly Liberman

My word of the year: hostages

I have never been able to guess the so-called word of the year, because the criteria are so vague: neither an especially frequent word nor an especially popular one, we are told, but the one that characterizes the past twelvemonth in a particularly striking way. To increase my puzzlement, every major dictionary has its own favorite, to be named and speedily forgotten.

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Messy, messy masculinity: The politics of eccentric men in the early United States

For every weirdo one finds while researching the past’s forgotten personalities, there are probably two or three more just a stone’s throw away whom time did not preserve. Ben Bascom (Feeling Singular: Queer Masculinities in the Early United States) assembles a collection of once neglected but now deeply curious stories that offer the underside to more popular narratives about the founding of the U.S and what it meant—and means—to be masculine.

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