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Cover image of "A Man on Fire: The Worlds of Thomas Wentworth Higginson" by Douglas R. Egerton featuring a close up painted portrait of Higginson

Thomas Wentworth Higginson and the freedom jubilee

By Douglas R. Egerton

“Colonel Higginson was a man on fire,” read one obituary. “He had convictions and lived up to them in the fullest degree.” The obituary added that he had “led the first negro regiment, contributed to the literature of America, and left an imprint upon history too deep to be obliterated.” Thomas Wentworth Higginson would have been pleased to have been referred to as “colonel.” He was proud of his military service and happily used the title for many decades after the end of the Civil War and up to his death in May 1911 at the age of eighty-seven.

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

Dwarf and its past

By Anatoly Liberman

First, my thanks to those who wrote kind words about my most recent essays. Especially welcome was the comment that sounded approximately so: “I understand almost nothing in his posts but always enjoy them.” It has always been my aim not only to provide my readers, listeners, and students with information but also to be a source of pure, unmitigated joy.

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

Slow and fast worms, herring, and their linguistic kin

By Anatoly Liberman

I received several questions in connection with my post for January 29, 2025, on the origin of the word eel and decided to answer them right away and in doing will revive the format of “gleanings.”

The best of Health Affairs Scholar 2024

By Sarah Flaig

As we welcome 2025, we reflect on the milestones and achievements that shaped Health Affairs Scholar in 2024. Among the highlights, we introduced our first Calls for Papers, focusing on the critical topics of: Global Aging, Intersections of Social Policies, and Health and Policy Options for the 340B Discount Program.

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

Slippery as an eel, merry as a grig

By Anatoly Liberman

My post on Yule redux (January 22, 2025) engendered two responses. One, published as a comment, states that my essays give the correspondent a lot of joy, though he does not understand much of what I say. I never thought that my writings sound like some sort of glossolalia.

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

Some barely iconic, epic usages

By Edwin L. Battistella

As a linguist, I understand that language shifts and changes. The voiced z sound of houses is being replaced by an unvoiced s sound. The abbreviation A.I. has become a verb, as in “He A.I.ed it.” Neologisms abound, tracked by the American Dialect Society, and new words often make us think of things in new ways.

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

Returning to Yule

By Anatoly Liberman

A reader, as I mentioned in one of the most recent posts, called my attention to the 1853 book The Two Babylons by the Reverend Alexander Hislop. The book, which has been reprinted many times since the middle of the nineteenth century and is still easily available, contains an original etymology of the word Yule (and this is why the comment was written)

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

Year in, year out

By Anatoly Liberman

As promised last week, the topic of this post is the history of the word year. It is hard to tell what hampers etymological discovery more. Consider two situations. If a word is relatively late and has no cognates, language historians are usually lost. This is what happens in dealing with slang and rare (isolated) regional words. For example, someone must have coined dweeb and nerd.

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

The year is new and young. Everything else is old

By Anatoly Liberman

It is almost certain that the main event in the reception in England of the formerly unpronounceable “low” word bloody (which first turned up in texts in 1540 and, consequently, existed in colloquial speech earlier) goes back to 1914, when Eliza Dolittle, the heroine of George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, uttered it from the stage. Nowadays, when in “public discourse,” the rich hoard of English adjectives has been reduced to the single F-word (at least so in the US), this purism of an age gone by cannot but amuse us.

The concept of emotional disorder

By Gloria Sibson Ayob

In August 2024, a special report on ‘ecological medicine’ was published in Psychiatry Online. The authors of the report describe ecological medicine as “the structured and deliberate use of connectedness and interaction with plants, animals, and other species to generate a therapeutic effect for individuals.”

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

Jolly Yule

By Anatoly Liberman

It is almost certain that the main event in the reception in England of the formerly unpronounceable “low” word bloody (which first turned up in texts in 1540 and, consequently, existed in colloquial speech earlier) goes back to 1914, when Eliza Dolittle, the heroine of George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, uttered it from the stage. Nowadays, when in “public discourse,” the rich hoard of English adjectives has been reduced to the single F-word (at least so in the US), this purism of an age gone by cannot but amuse us.

Oxford University Press. Best Books of 2024

A look behind the curtain at the best books of 2024

By Sarah Butcher

Every year, Oxford University Press’s trade program publishes 70-100 new books written for the general reader. The vast audience for these trade books comprises everyone from history buffs, popular science nerds, and philosophy enthusiasts pursuing intellectual interests, as well as parents and caregivers seeking crucial advice or support—all readers browsing the aisles of their local bookstore (or the Amazon new releases) for literature that deepens their insight into the world around them.

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

Does “the” get italics?

By Edwin L. Battistella

One of the idiosyncrasies of copy editing that befuddles me involves the word “the”. Should it be capitalized and italicized when one refers to newspaper titles in a piece of writing? The Chicago Manual of Style will tell you no.

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

Varia

By Anatoly Liberman

It is almost certain that the main event in the reception in England of the formerly unpronounceable “low” word bloody (which first turned up in texts in 1540 and, consequently, existed in colloquial speech earlier) goes back to 1914, when Eliza Dolittle, the heroine of George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, uttered it from the stage. Nowadays, when in “public discourse,” the rich hoard of English adjectives has been reduced to the single F-word (at least so in the US), this purism of an age gone by cannot but amuse us.

Cover image by "Europe Against Revolution: Conservatism, Enlightenment, & the Making of the Past" by Matthijs Lok

The idea of Europe

By Matthijs Lok

In the decades around 1800—when the European past was (as in the present) the topic of fierce discussion, contestation, and political (ab)use—ideas of Europe were dominated by the shocking events of the French Revolution and its violent aftermath in Europe and beyond. The European order as well as Europe’s place in the world, was destroyed, rebuilt, and redefined at this moment.

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

The once unpronounceable word “bloody”

By Anatoly Liberman

It is almost certain that the main event in the reception in England of the formerly unpronounceable “low” word bloody (which first turned up in texts in 1540 and, consequently, existed in colloquial speech earlier) goes back to 1914, when Eliza Dolittle, the heroine of George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, uttered it from the stage. Nowadays, when in “public discourse,” the rich hoard of English adjectives has been reduced to the single F-word (at least so in the US), this purism of an age gone by cannot but amuse us.