race / racism 17 December 2025 Race and racism permeate nearly every aspect of present-day American culture. Yet the concept of race as most people perceive it today is a relatively new one. While demonizing the “other” and the idea of grouping people by kinship dates to antiquity, grouping people by skin color
2025: My Year in Astrophotography Nothing to do with words or language, but I also take pictures of the night sky. Here are the ones I took this past year.
misdemeanor / high misdemeanor 15 December 2025 As even non-lawyers know, in current U.S. legal parlance a misdemeanor is a less serious crime, whereas more serious crimes are classified as felonies. But what is the origin of the term? And how did it come to be used in the context of presidential impeachments
impeach / impeachment 12 December 2025 The verb to impeach has a straightforward and unsurprising etymology, but the noun impeachment has an unusual twist. The English verb to impeach is a late fourteenth century borrowing from the Anglo-Norman empescher. This French verb comes from the medieval Latin impedicare, meaning to entangle or hinder,
hobbit 10 December 2025 In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. So begins J. R. R. Tolkien’s 1937 novel The Hobbit. A hobbit, as anyone who doesn’t live in a hole in the ground knows, is a small humanoid creature with hairy feet and a fondness
woo-woo 8 December 2025 Ghosts, magic crystals, faeries, homeopathy, Bigfoot, astrology, and the like are all examples of woo-woo or woo. But why are they called that? When and where does the term come from? The Oxford English Dictionary and Green’s Dictionary of Slang both say that woo-woo is onomatopoeia
quid pro quo 5 December 2025 Quid pro quo literally means “this for that” in Latin, but when did it appear and what does it mean in English? The catchphrase arose in post-classical Latin in the fourth century CE. An early appearance in English is in the 1535 translation of Erasmus’s A
OK Boomer 3 December 2025 Ok Boomer is a dismissive reply by a young person directed at a Baby Boomer (or Gen Xer—the traditional generational boundaries are not always observed in the wild. The phrase is rather disrespectful of their elders, but after years of being blamed for not getting “real”
hairbag 1 December 2025 What is a hairbag? And is it a bad thing? The term has been New York City police slang for a veteran officer since at least 1958, when it was recorded in a glossary of police slang in the October issue of Spring 3100, a New York
meme Most of us are familiar with memes, those images with varying text that propagate, often virally, through the internet, but where does the word meme come from? It may be surprising to many, but the word meme was coined by biologist and famed promoter of atheism Richard Dawkins in 1976.
smoot I usually don’t write up novelty words, but smoot has a neat ironic twist that is impossible to ignore. A smoot is a unit of linear measure equal to 1.7018 meters (5 feet, 7 inches). It is named after Oliver Reed Smoot, Jr. (b. 1940). The smoot grew
