Of the four tiers of high school, sophomore is the year that stands out as strange. Freshman, junior, and senior are relatively clear monikers for their associated levels, and it’s funny that in school, the place where you are most expected to know the how and why of everything, second-year students are called by a term whose roots are abstruse. Then there is the problem …
Yes, it’s true, there’s a wild story behind the god who lends his name to Tuesday: Tiu, also sometimes spelled Tiw. Tiu’s remarkable myth even involves women with beards (more on that in a bit). But, the past 1,000 years or so have not been kind to this Germanic divinity. Who is Tuesday named for? Tuesday comes from the Old English tīwesdæg, meaning “Tiu’s day.” Tiu …
The instantly recognizable statues on Easter Island (887 of them), called moai, have perplexed and fascinated explorers, experts and average folks since the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen came across it in 1722. And Mr. Roggeveen is the reason it’s called Easter Island. He and his crew dropped anchor on Easter Sunday. The current inhabitants of Isla de Pascua (Spanish for “Easter Island”) call it Rapa Nui, a …
Dry Ink by Samantha O. from Miller Place, NYThe sun is setting. The sailboats are in clusters far out past the buoys. The beach is a picture already painted. A photograph already developed. And though I can feel the sand underneath my feet and the salt on my lips, It has already been. Wind has already brushed through my hair, The end of the …
Many American English speakers know that people say pop in Chicago, soda in Philadelphia, and coke in New Orleans, and that they all refer to a carbonated, flavored, and sweetened soft drink. But most of us don’t know that a blue norther is a cold wind in Texas or a pogonip is a dense, icy fog in Nevada. Where would one even look up obscure …
Gaming terms can be as foreign to non-gamers as technical jargon and quantum mechanics, but a closer look at the gamer’s glossary reveals many of the words to be intuitive extensions of words and concepts familiar to the non-gamer. Here are some gaming terms defined and explained for the gamer in all of us. Roguelike Roguelike refers to a type of video game that tends …
To modern ears, the following excerpt from Anthony Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right, published in 1869, sounds risqué. Trollope writes: It is not pleasant to make love in the presence of a third person, even when that love is all fair and above board; but it is quite impracticable to do so to a married lady, when that married lady’s sister is present. As …
Graphologists, or self-proclaimed handwriting experts, claim that it does. Specifically they claim that individuals who share certain personality traits write in a similar fashion, so graphologists analyze handwriting to deduce the character traits of the writer. In the early 1900s, Milton Newman Bunker invented the most common graphology technique called graphoanalysis. (Other methods of graphology predate Bunker’s work.) His approach relies on the stroke shape …
oops, misspelling
To explore the psyche of a people, do not look at what they do–look at what they do wrong. Today, we introduce the Misspelling of the Year. A word that was looked up significantly more this year than the year before. A word with lots of different misspellings. A word in the news. The word: furlough. In 2013, Dictionary.com saw tens of thousands of lookups …
From PRISM and the Edward Snowden scandal to the arrival of Google Glass, 2013 was the year that the desire to be seen and heard was turned on its head. Consider the following: In January, the TSA scrapped airport body scanners that produce near-naked images of travelers; In June, Edward Snowden revealed the widespread global-spying program, Project PRISM; In October, Google announced new privacy policy …
2013 was an exciting year for the English vocabulary. Some long-simmering terms like twerk bounced into the spotlight, while new coinages (from the trendy cronut and selfie to the serious Obamacare) cemented their place in the English language. As the English language grows and evolves, so must our dictionary. Here are just a few words recently added to Dictionary.com: Google Glass DWT bitcoin binge-watch confusticate …
Bilbo Baggins, Frodo Baggins, and Samwise Gamgee—we all know J.R.R. Tolkien created these beloved hobbits for his Hobbit (1937) and Lord of the Rings (1954–55) books. Hobbits are an imaginary race similar to humans, but they are short and have hairy feet. But, while Tolkien conjured up these memorable creatures, did he also the invent word hobbit? Where did hobbit come from? As you may have …
