Words & Stuff

A submission referred to "Ford dooleys," obviously (from context) a kind of vehicle. I spent a while poking around online trying to find out more; encountered the spellings "doolie," "duelly,"...

Turns out "nabe" is short for "neighborhood" (in the sense, I think, of the community that lives near you); apparently originally used in the phrase "the nabes" to refer to...

I don't want to turn this blog entirely into words I encountered in Privilege of the Sword, but I do want to note that a "fichu" is a particular kind...

"Hartshorn" is a (perhaps old-fashioned) term for a particular kind of smelling salts (using ammonia); MW11 says it's because harts' horns were once the main source for ammonia. Another one...

"Chypre" (from French, meaning "Cyprus") is a kind of perfume. I encountered it in Ellen Kushner's The Privilege of the Sword....

A "Scouser" is a person from Liverpool; which is to say, a Liverpudlian. According to MW3, the name is due to "lobscouse" (a meat and vegetable stew) being popular in...

The Wikipedia entry for railfan contains a small trove of unfamiliar-to-me words. The term itself has the meaning you'd probably expect: someone who's interested in railroads. But the article also...

I've known the phrase "RTFM" for many years, and I've been using the phrase "TSOR" for about three years, but I had never previously encountered "STFW." At first I thought...

I had heard of fuller's earth before, but I had always thought it was named after someone named "Fuller." (Doesn't "Fuller's Earth" sound like the name of a science fiction...

A "tranche" is "a division or portion of a pool or whole," sez MW11; apparently "pool" in this context refers to finance. And "tranche" apparently has a very specific meaning...