fleabag Fleabag is a pejorative term for a bed or place of lodging or for a dirty, disreputable person. It is apparently a calque of the German Flohbeutel, a pejorative for a person lacking personal hygiene, although the English word may have been coined independently. An 1805 German-English dictionary has the
potassium / potash Potassium is a chemical element with the atomic number 19 and the symbol K. It is a soft, silvery-white, alkali metal that reacts rapidly and violently with oxygen. Potassium is necessary for life as we know it, required for nerve transmission among other cellular functions, and it has many commercial
flak / flack Flack and flak are two very different words that are often confused and conflated. A flack is a publicist, while flak is anti-aircraft fire. Both start appearing in American English in the 1930s, but in very different spheres. The origin of flack is uncertain, but it may be after Gene
fantastic Fantastic comes via Old French from the Latin fantasticus or phantasticus, which in turn is from the Greek φανταστικός (phantastikos). The Greek verb φαντάζειν (phantazein) means to make visible and φαντάζεσθαι (phantazesthai) means to imagine, to have visions. Words like fantasy, phantom, and fancy come from the same root. The
polonium Polonium is a chemical element with atomic number 84 and the symbol Po. It is a highly radioactive metal. Once used widely in various commercial applications, such uses have largely been abandoned out of safety concerns. Its use today is primarily as a source for alpha radiation in laboratories and
Juneteenth (An entry from the archives at Wordorigins.org, dated 30 June 2022) Juneteenth is celebrated on 19 June and is, obviously, a blend or portmanteau of June + nineteen. It commemorates the date in 1865 when Major General Gordon Granger of the Union army freed the slaves in Galveston, Texas. Lincoln’
literally Literally is often the target of grammar scolds and pedants. What the scolds are carping on is the figurative use of the word, as in, I was literally glued to my seat. The word literally comes to us, via French, from the Latin literalis, meaning pertaining to letters. It literally
dickens No, not the famous nineteenth-century writer. This is the slang term, as in the exclamation what the dickens? Dickens is a euphemism for devil. The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from the 1599 play King Edward IV, Part 1, commonly attributed to Thomas Heywood. The passage is
meitnerium Meitnerium is a synthetic chemical element with atomic number 109 and the symbol Mt. It is extremely radioactive, with a half-life measured in seconds. It was first created in 1982 at the Center for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt, Germany. It is named for physicist Lise Meitner, the physicist who
D-Day / H-Hour D-Day is the name for 6 June 1944, when Allied troops landed on the coast of German-occupied France during World War II. It was the largest seaborne invasion in history, with over 150,000 American, British, and Canadian troops landing in Normandy, including 23,000 airborne paratroopers, and involving almost
separation of church and state It is often said that the US Constitution erected a wall of separation between church and state. But these words do not appear in the text of the Constitution. Instead, the phrase comes from an 1802 letter by Thomas Jefferson to the Baptist Association of Danbury, Connecticut. The association had
bootylicious / babelicious Bootylicious is an adjective meaning sexually attractive. It is formed from booty + -alicious, which is derived from delicious. Use of the combining form -alicious to form new words dates to the late nineteenth century and marks the quality of the first element of the compound as being appetizing or attractive.
platinum Platinum is a chemical element with atomic number 78 and the symbol Pt. It is a silvery-white, unreactive, dense, malleable, and ductile semimetal. It is a precious metal, at times being more expensive than gold, and is often used in jewelry. Its most common application, however, is in catalytic converters
