weapon of mass destruction / WMD / conventional weapon Most people became aware of the terms weapon of mass destruction and WMD during the run up to the first Gulf War in 1990–91. And they again entered the public consciousness during the second war with Iraq which started twelve years later. Both times Saddam Hussein had been thought
urban / suburbs / suburbia / burbs The typical path of a term’s development is the appearance of the root, then the root is added to, through compounding, adding affixes (i.e., derivation), or some other means. Then it may be clipped to shorter form. But urban / suburban reverses this usual order. We see the clipped
viking We all have a solid idea of what a viking was, one of a band of a horned-helmeted, Old Norse warriors who ravaged northern Europe in the medieval period. And that idea is wrong. Not only did viking helmets not have horns, the Norse people who sailed about the northern
mine / undermine To undermine something is to destroy it through some surreptitious means, to subvert it, and undermine is one of those words whose etymology is readily apparent by examining its constituent elements, under + mine, originally a reference to the military tactic of digging under the walls of a fortification in order
groove / in the groove / groovy Most of us probably associate the slang word groovy with 1960s counterculture, but it’s considerably older than that, with the slang sense arising in 1930s jazz jargon. And the metaphorical sense of groove is even older. Groove was borrowed from the Dutch groeve in the fifteenth century. It is
truthiness In today’s usage, truthiness is inextricably linked with comedian/talk-show host Stephen Colbert, who used the word on the premiere, 17 October 2005, episode of his television show The Colbert Report (2005–14). Truthiness, as used by Colbert, is the truth as we wish it to be, what we
triumph The word triumph comes to us from Latin, but its usual meaning in that language is not the one we commonly give to it in English. To the ancient Romans, a triumphus was a parade celebrating a great military victory. The victorious general would ride a chariot through the streets
antisemitism vs. anti-Semitism The copyeditor in me noticed that the Donald Trump’s executive order of 29 January 2025 titled Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism uses the hyphenated and capitalized form of that word instead of now usually preferred forms antisemitism and antisemitic. The change in preferred spelling is both an example of
spendthrift / dingthrift Etymologically, spendthrift is rather unremarkable. It is a simple compound of the verb to spend and the noun thrift, meaning savings. A spendthrift, therefore, is someone who spends their savings, one who wastes money. The earliest use of the word that I’m aware of is in Stephen Batman’s
virus / viral Virus is a word that has evolved alongside the evolution in medical knowledge; before the twentieth century a virus was something quite different from the microorganisms we assign the name to today, and even more recently the word has broken the bounds of biology and infected the realm of silicon
March Madness [This is an archived post, originally published on 17 March 2023.] March Madness is the originally popular, later trademarked, name for the US National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) basketball championship tournament held each year in that month. But the phrase did not originate with the NCAA, or even with basketball
slim The most common use of slim is as an adjective meaning slender or thin, but that is not the only use of the word, and its earliest known appearance in English is as a noun meaning a tall person. It’s a sixteenth-century borrowing from Dutch. In English, slim, meaning
polite It is quite common for a word with a specific and literal meaning to develop figurative or metaphorical meanings that are related to the literal one. And sometimes we can see this same change across multiple languages. Such is the case with polite. The Latin verb polire means to smooth,
