Calvinball (Recent US Supreme Court decisions have brought this post, originally published on 2 May 2019, to mind.) Calvinball is the name of a fictional sport coined by cartoonist Bill Watterston in his syndicated comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. In the strip, Calvinball is a sport where the participants make up
grog Grog is another name for booze. Originally, it applied specifically to a mix of rum and water, often with added sugar and lime juice, served to sailors in the Royal Navy, and over time it came to be applied to any spirit or beer. The etymology of the word has
stool pigeon In American underworld slang, a stool pigeon is a police informer. The stool is puzzling to most. It is a variant on an older word, stale, meaning a decoy or lure. That word comes from the Old English stæl, meaning place (also the source of our present-day word stall). The
special relationship The Oxford English Dictionary defines the phrase special relationship as “a particularly close relationship between countries, often resulting from shared history, politics, or culture, spec. that of the United Kingdom with the United States.” While that definition is correct as far as it goes, it misses the point that the
Gish gallop A Gish gallop is a rhetorical tactic in which a debater quickly runs through an extended series of falsehoods, misrepresentations, and shoddy arguments that are impossible to refute in the context of the debate format. The term was coined in 1994 by anthropologist Eugenie Scott, then the director of the
praseodymium / neodymium / didymium Praseodymium is a chemical element with atomic number 59 and the symbol Pr. Neodymium has atomic number 60 and the symbol Nd. Both are silvery, malleable metals that are found together in nature, making them twins of a sort. Both are widely used in the production of colored glass and
flap / flip / flop / flip-flop In the midst of his 2004 presidential campaign, Senator John Kerry said of his vote on funding for the war in Iraq, “I actually did vote for the $87 billion, before I voted against it.” This may be one of the most bald-faced and succinct examples of flip-flopping in American
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
