Dave Wilton

Dave has a PhD in medieval English literature from the University of Toronto and has been publishing Wordorigins.org since 1997.

confabulation / confab / fable

Confabulation is a neat study of how a word can acquire an additional sense. It was borrowed into English in the fifteenth century from the Latin confabulatio, meaning a conversation or discussion. The word appears in Anglo-Latin by the late ninth century English-language use, in the same sense, is in

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akimbo (paid)

vet / veterinarian / veteran

Vet has three distinct meanings. It can be a verb meaning to examine thoroughly, especially of a person slated for a position of responsibility; it can be a noun meaning a doctor who treats animals; and it can be a noun meaning an experienced person, especially a soldier or a

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zeppelin (paid)

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Cajun / Acadian / Arcadian (paid)

nuclear option

The term nuclear option is used figuratively, especially in politics, to refer to a response that threatens “mutual assured destruction.” It is, as the Oxford English Dictionary defines it, “the most drastic of the possible responses to a situation.” But of course, it does have a more literal original sense.

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confabulation / confab / fable (paid)

Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party

The fictional and satirical Leopards Eating Faces Party was the brainchild of Adrian Bott, who posted the following to Twitter on 16 October 2015: “I never thought leopards would eat MY face,” sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party. The sentiment, in the midst of

love bug

Back when I used to live in Texas, each spring I would be subjected to two assaults. The first was by allergies, which I’d experienced before when living in more temperate climes, but which are especially bad in the Texas spring when everything is in bloom. The other was

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vet / veterinarian / veteran (paid)

tarheel / rosin heel

Tarheel is a nickname for a native of North Carolina. The term is preceded by the older rosin heel. Originally an epithet, its early history is mixed up in the racist attitudes of the antebellum South. But tarheel has been ameliorated and is now used proudly by residents of that

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nuclear option (paid)

fiscal / procurator-fiscal

One of my favorite TV shows is Shetland, a police procedural set, obviously, on the Shetland Islands. One of the words that keeps popping up is fiscal. The detectives talk of referring matters to the “fiscal” or someone has to fly to Aberdeen to meet with the "fiscal office.

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Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party (paid)

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love bug (paid)

star-spangled

We all know that Francis Scott Key wrote the Star-Spangled Banner in 1814 after watching the British bombardment of Fort McHenry in Baltimore harbor: O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave? But most of us don’

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Trump Dropped the Big One

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tarheel / rosin heel (paid)

don't look a gift horse in the mouth

The proverb don't look a gift horse in the mouth dates back to antiquity. The phrase’s underlying metaphor is that a horse’s age can be judged by examining its teeth, and it is rude to question something that is freely given. There are calques of the

loo

Loo, the British word for a lavatory or toilet is one of those words that has generated endless speculation and myth about its origin. It is almost certainly from the French lieu, meaning place, a euphemism if there ever was one. The English loo doesn’t make an unambiguous appearance

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fiscal / procurator-fiscal (paid)

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star-spangled (paid)

baseball

When examining the origins of a word one must be careful to distinguish between the word and the thing itself. The origin of the word is often quite different from the origin of the thing that it represents. Such is the case with baseball. In this case the word is

I asked ChatGPT…

TL;DR: ChatGPT’s Research AI is fundamentally flawed. It misleads and hallucinates, only scratches the surface of what information is available, and ends up creating more work for the researcher than if they had just started from scratch on their own. I set out to test ChatGPT’s Research

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don't look a gift horse in the mouth (paid)