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
booty / booty call Booty is actually two different words, one meaning plunder or loot and the other referring to sex. Booty, referring to plunder or loot, of is uncertain origin. It was borrowed from some European language, but there are any number of potential candidates. It’s cognate with the modern German Beute,
Shoddy Scholarship by Those Who Should Know Better Last week the website Medievalists.net published a listicle titled, 12 Expressions that We Got from the Middle Ages. Unfortunately, only four of the twelve are actually medieval phrases, and two others, while modern formulations, come from metaphors that are rooted in medieval thought. The other six either predate the
berserk / berserker Today, to be or to go berserk means to be frenzied or crazed, and the term carries a connotation of violence. The word comes from the Icelandic berserkr, meaning a powerful Norse warrior who displayed a wild and uncontrolled fury on the battlefield. In other words, a stereotypical Viking, or
phosphorus Phosphorus comes into English from classical Latin, where Phosphorus is a name for the planet Venus. The name comes ultimately from the Greek; the roots are φως- (phos-, light) + -φόρος (-phoros, bringer). So phosphorus is the light-bringer, and the element is named for its luminescent properties. (Lucifer also literally means
basket case It is not uncommon for a grisly or shocking term to lose its impact over the years, to meliorate. Such is the situation with basket case. As the term is commonly used today, a basket case is someone who is under physical or, more usually, mental distress to the point
hard-nosed To be hard-nosed is to be stubborn, unsentimental, uncompromising. The phrase is an Americanism, dating to the early twentieth century, but why hard-nosed? The answer comes from rifle ammunition. In the late nineteenth century, the introduction of cordite and nitrocellulose gunpowder, in addition to be being “smokeless,” created higher muzzle
