Newsletter neon Neon is a chemical element, a noble gas, with atomic number 10 and the symbol Ne. It was discovered in 1898 by William Ramsay and Morris W. Travers, who named it after the Greek νέον (new). Neon has a small number of applications, the most well known of which is,
Newsletter lunatic-fringe As commonly used today, a lunatic fringe is an extremist minority in a movement or group. But that’s not its original meaning. The earliest uses of the phrase deprecatingly refer to a woman’s hairstyle, one where the hair is cut straight across the forehead, that is to say,
Newsletter SWAT / swatting SWAT is a US police acronym of the phrase Special Weapons and Tactics. A SWAT team is a paramilitary police unit trained and equipped to engage in situations where violence was expected, such as hostage situations and drug raids. According to Mitchel P. Roth’s Historical Dictionary of Law Enforcement,
Newsletter moscovium Moscovium is a synthetic chemical element with atomic number 115 and the symbol Mc. It is extremely radioactive, its longest-lived isotope has a half-life of less than a second. It has no applications other than pure research. Element 115 was first synthesized in 2003 at the Joint Institute for Nuclear
Newsletter bachelor This word for an unmarried man has had several meanings over the centuries. Bachelor is borrowed from Anglo-Norman bacheler, which is presumably from the Latin baccalaria, a division of land. The normal sound changes would lead us to conclude that the French is from the form baccalaris, but that form
Newsletter leap-year The necessity for adding a day to the calendar every four years is due to the fact that the Earth’s orbit of the sun is not exactly 365 days; it’s closer to 365.25 days. Therefore, about every four years we add one day to the calendar to
Newsletter molybdenum Molydenum is a chemical element with atomic number 42 and the symbol Mo. It has been known since antiquity but was generally considered a type of lead or graphite. It wasn’t classified as an element until the eighteenth century. The element takes its name from the Latin molybdaena, a
Newsletter Valkyrie Words disappear from the language all the time. The concepts they represent become less useful or they are replaced by spiffier, newer terms and fade into obscurity and eventual disappearance from all but the largest of historical dictionaries. But occasionally these words are plucked from the fields of the slain
Newsletter G-man To an American, a G-man is a federal law enforcement officer, and the G is generally taken to come from government, but this may not be the case. There is an earlier Irish use of G-man used to refer to police officers of the G Division, the detective division, of
mendelevium Mendelevium is a radioactive, synthetic chemical element in the actinide series with atomic number 101 and the symbol Md. It has no uses outside of pure research. It was first synthesized at the University of California Berkeley by a team led by Stanley G. Thompson that included Albert Ghiorso, Glenn
Australia The continent of Australia gets its name, appropriately enough, from the Latin australis, meaning southern. And the name Terra australis incognita (unknown southern land) has been applied to hypothetical southern continents since antiquity. There is no all-encompassing Indigenous name for the continent; instead there is a wide variety of local
Arctic / Antarctic Artic and Antarctic have pretty straightforward etymologies. The only hiccup is that they are borrowed from both French and Latin—English acquired the words in the late fourteenth century, at a time when the literati were conversant in both French and Latin, so it is impossible to untangle the influences
