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loo (paid)

  • Dave Wilton

Dave Wilton

20 Jun 2025 • 3 min read
Photo of a lavatory / watercloset

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B&W drawing of a young girl standing amid a crowd of bearded men in a tavern

waive / waif / wave / waver

Waive, waif, wave, and waver all appear to be related, and while they may share a common Proto-Germanic root in *webna- / *wepna-, their etymological histories are quite different. The verb to waive, comes from the Anglo-Norman legal verb weyver, meaning to dismiss a legal obligation. English use dates to the
20 Jun 2025 4 min read
Poem about baseball with an engraving of three boys playing a game with a ball and three posts as bases
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baseball (paid)

18 Jun 2025 10 min read
B&W photo of a woman lying on a bed in a hospital ward; behind her are four other patients and a doctor examining one

patient zero

The term patient zero is an epidemiological term for the person who transmits an infection into a population that had been free of it. The term arose during the initial stages of the AIDS pandemic as a misinterpretation of the label Patient O—a capital letter O, not a zero—
18 Jun 2025 5 min read
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