Archive for Etymology
litter, welter, miasma
This morning, out of the welter of vague half-formed thoughts that ran through my head as I woke up, the first coherent one was something like this: Is litter as...
Great Scott
An article about the origin of the phrase “Great Scott!”. Short version: it's a minced oath, probably originally referring to US General Winfield Scott....
Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony
Someone mentioned the Emmy Awards the other day, and I realized I wasn't sure why they were called that. I figured they must have been named after some famous person...
piggy bank
If you search the web to determine the etymology of the phrase piggy bank, you'll quickly conclude that there is little disagreement over its origin. Many web pages give the...
eucalyptus and hell are cognates
The other day, Jim and I were looking at a eucalyptus tree, and I realized that although the eu- part was obvious, I had no idea what the -calyptus part...
muggy
Mary Anne noted in passing recently that it was muggy in Chicago, and I realized that though I've known the word all my life, I didn't know where it came...
boson
I've known the word boson for years, but I don't think I knew until recently that it's named after Indian physicist Satyendranath Bose (also written “Satyendra Nath Bose”), as in...
History of the phrase “people of color”
Just encountered the phrase “men of color” in an 1857 article about the Dred Scott case from the Albany, NY Evening Journal. I could have sworn that there was a...
warfarin
I've known for a while that there's an anticoagulant named warfarin, but it never occurred to me to look up its etymology; I always just assumed it had something to...