lorem ipsum 4 September 2026 Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet ... This seemingly pseudo-Latin, phrase is used in the typesetting industry as a place holder for text. It is intended to be a meaningless passage used to demonstrate what a printed page will look like without the reader being distracted by the
hokey / hokey pokey 2 September 2026 The Hokey Pokey is a dance, and hokey pokey is also part of an old street vendors' cry indicating ice cream is for sale. It can refer to inferior or knock-off products. When standing alone, the first element in the phrase, hokey is an adjective
pride 31 August 2026 Pride comes to us from the Old English pryde or pryte, which had a core meaning pretty much the same as the present-day word. But strangely, its origin is quite different from that of proud. Our present-day adjective proud is a reflex of an Old
EGOT 28 August 2026 EGOT is an acronym for Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony and is a status given to people who have won all four awards. To date, twenty-two people have achieved EGOT status with competitive awards, the most recent being Steven Spielberg, who achieved the status with a
buckaroo 26 August 2026 A buckaroo is a cowboy, or in later usage someone with the demeanor and vibe of a cowboy. The word has a rather straightforward etymology: it is an alteration of the Spanish vaquero, and its use comes out of the nineteenth-century American West. Like many such
camp 24 August 2026 Camp has a general meaning of temporary dwelling place, originally used in military contexts. But it also has a slang sense, originating in gay slang, of flamboyance or exaggeration, or as an adjective meaning affected or effeminate. The word was borrowed into Old English from the Latin
kinetic 21 August 2026 Kinetic is an adjective that relates to motion; it’s a mid nineteenth-century borrowing from the Greek κῑνητικός (kinetikos). The noun kinetics, referring to the study of bodies in motion and the forces acting upon them, was formed from the adjective at about the same time.
great white hope 19 August 2026 In current parlance, a great white hope, sometimes simply white hope, refers to someone in a particular field in whom others place expectations and desires for success. Originally it referred to a white person who might have success in a field dominated by people of color, and
uncanny valley 17 August 2026 The phrase uncanny valley is a calque of the Japanese phrase bukimi no tani (bukimi (uncanniness + no (possessive particle) + tani (valley)). The Japanese phrase was coined by Masahiro Mori in a 1970 article in which he observed people’s emotional affinity toward robots rising as they appeared
Anglo-Saxon 14 August 2026 Anglo-Saxon is a problematic term. Historically, it is a misnomer, and in modern use it is strongly associated with ethnic, and often white supremacist, identity. As such, it should probably be avoided in favor of terms like English, Early English, pre-Conquest, and, for the language
