I'm always a little surprised to find that a common English word that I don't associate with Asia derives directly from an East Asian or South Asian root. I've known...
I mentioned this in a comment in my main journal, but I figure it's worth recording here as well. The Clancy Brothers recorded an Ewan MacColl song, "Shoals of Herring,"...
I usually post words here after I find out what they mean, but I just encountered three words that I can't find relevant definitions for, so I'm gonna post 'em...
Seen in a submission. "Scoria" (derived eventually from Greek "skōr," meaning "excrement") means "slag." Emphasis on first syllable. Amusingly, MW11 defines "scoria" as "slag," and defines "slag" as "the dross...
As food travels through the digestive system, it spends some time in the stomach, where it's turned into a "semifluid mass" (says MW11) called "chyme." See The Digestive System for...
Another one from a submission: "pyroclastic" refers to fragmenting due to volcanic action. In the story, I think it was being used as a synonym for "volcanic," but I'm not...
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...
It turns out that the word "canvas" derives ultimately from the Latin word "cannabis"; which, of course, means "hemp." Not only that, but apparently the word "hemp" itself may be...
At WorldCon, I ran into a couple of reading pronunciations I hadn't heard before. A reading pronunciation happens when you learn a word by reading it rather than hearing it...