Words & Stuff

According to Wikipedia: “The Hajnal line is a border that links Saint Petersburg, Russia and Trieste, Italy. In 1965, John Hajnal discovered it divides Europe into two areas characterized by different levels of nuptiality. To the west of the line, marriage rates and thus fertility were comparatively low and a significant minority of women married […]

According to my dictionary, to sparge is to “sprinkle, bespatter, [or] spray.”

According to Wikipedia: “In the United States, a plat […] is a map, drawn to scale, showing the divisions of a piece of land. […] City, town or village plats show subdivisions into blocks with streets and alleys.” That Wikipedia page also introduced me to the term cadastral, which my dictionary defines as “showing or […]

Long discussion of waits, posted a few years ago. Excerpt: Waits, or Waights, seem originally to have been a kind of musical watchmen, who, in order to prove their watchfulness, were required to pipe at stated hours of the night. The hautboy was also called a waight,—perhaps from being the pipe upon which they commonly […]

We have long been familiar with the royal we and the editorial we, the use of plural pronouns to refer to a singular personage. But we had not heretofore been aware that the royal we is also known as the majestic plural, nor had we known that the majestic plural, the editorial we, and the […]

According to Wiktionary, fesh-fesh is “Fine dust (sand) that looks like solid ground but behaves like soft mud.”

According to Wikipedia: “Qiviuq […] is the inner wool of the muskox. In Inuktitut the same word can be used to refer to the down feathers of birds.”

According to my dictionary, palliasse means “a thin straw mattress used as a pallet.”

According to Wikipedia: “Puisne […] is a legal term of art used mainly in British English meaning ‘inferior in rank.’ It is pronounced like the word puny.”