palladium Palladium is actually two words, with distinct, albeit related, etymological paths and meanings. The older use of the word comes from Greek myth, the newer one is the name of element 46. The original sense of palladium (often capitalized) was the name of a statue of the goddess Athena in
dollars to doughnuts The phrase (I’ll bet) dollars to doughnuts is an Americanism dating to the late nineteenth century, referring to the stakes of an imagined wager on a sure thing. While due to inflation, today one would be hard pressed to find a doughnut for less than a dollar, when the
meme stock A meme stock is a publicly traded stock that experiences a sudden rise in value due to a concerted effort by a number of retail investors who organize over social media. The price of a meme stock usually has no relation to actual value of the company in question; they
oxygen Oxygen is a chemical element with atomic number eight and the symbol O. It is a highly reactive nonmetal that is a gas at room temperature. It’s the most abundant element in the earth’s crust and the third most abundant element in the universe, after hydrogen and helium.
bee's knees Most people associate the bee’s knees, meaning something that is excellent or otherwise superlative, with the Roaring ’20s and the Jazz Age. But while the phrase did come into its present-day meaning shortly before and experienced a rise in popularity during that era, it has precursor meanings that predate
creek / up shit's creek I had no idea that British usage of creek was different from the use of the word in the rest of the English-speaking world until I was translating an Old Norse work (appropriately enough regarding the discovery and exploration of Vinland) and found that my Old Norse dictionary, produced in
zirconium / zircon / hyacinth Zirconium is a chemical element with atomic number 40 and the symbol Zr. It is a lustrous, gray-white metal. The mineral zirconium silicate, also known as zircon, is common in the earth’s crust and has been known since antiquity. Zirconium has a variety of commercial uses, and zircon crystals
spaghettify / spaghettification Astronomers are often rather creative with the names they come up with for the objects and processes they discover. An example is the verb to spaghettify and the noun spaghettification. The words describe what would happen to a person (or thing) who fell into a black hole. The gravity (tidal
cat's pajamas / whiskers / meow The phrase the cat’s pajamas (also cat’s whiskers or cat’s meow), meaning something superlative or excellent, is indelibly associated with the 1920s and the jazz age. The phrase is often credited to cartoonist Thomas Aloysius “Tad” Dorgan, but while he did use the cat’s meow (and
oganesson Oganesson is a synthetic chemical element with atomic number 118 and the symbol Og. The element is named for Yuri Oganessian (b. 1933), a lead researcher at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia. Oganesson is the second element to be named after a living person, the other
ham A ham is a bad or overly dramatic and emotive actor. But why ham? What does the meat have to do with the theater? In this case the etymology, where the word comes from, is reasonably clear, but the etiology, why it is so, remains mysterious, with the only answers
jabroni Fans of professional wrestling will undoubtedly be familiar with the term jabroni, meaning a loser, a poser, an incompetent or substandard wrestler. The wrestler (now actor and general-purpose celebrity) Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson popularized the term beginning in the late 1990s. To call someone a jabroni is, of course, an
