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A collection of 123 posts

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Thanksgiving

Nov 23, 2024 3 min read

Drawing of 3 men with sickles bending over and harvesting wheat being supervised by a standing man holding two staffs

tacit

Tacit is an adjective that denotes something that is silently or wordlessly understood. It’s etymology is quite straightforward, a borrowing from the Latin tacitus, the past participle of the verb tacere, meaning to be silent. Thomas Eliot’s 1538 dictionary records the Latin. Early dictionaries like this one included

Mar 11, 2024 3 min read

Photo of a busy city street at night, brightly lit by neon and other lights

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,

Mar 8, 2024 2 min read

Black-and-white photo of a museum gallery with modern art paintings on the walls and a sculpture in the middle of the room

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,

Mar 6, 2024 5 min read

Drawing of 3 men with sickles bending over and harvesting wheat being supervised by a standing man holding two staffs

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tacit (paid)

Mar 4, 2024 3 min read

Photo of police in camouflage uniforms and helmets standing near two armored vehicles

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,

Mar 4, 2024 3 min read

A young man standing in front of an onion-domed cathedral (St. Basil’s Cathedral, Moscow); a crowd is milling about

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

Mar 1, 2024 2 min read

Photo of a busy city street at night, brightly lit by neon and other lights

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neon (paid)

Mar 1, 2024 2 min read

Movie poster for 1947’s The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer. Image Shirley Temple embracing a confused Cary Grant.

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

Feb 28, 2024 3 min read

Black-and-white photo of a museum gallery with modern art paintings on the walls and a sculpture in the middle of the room

Paid-members only

lunatic-fringe (paid)

Feb 28, 2024 5 min read

Photo of police in camouflage uniforms and helmets standing near two armored vehicles

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SWAT / swatting (paid)

Feb 26, 2024 3 min read

Calendar for February 2024, including February 29

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

Feb 26, 2024 3 min read

A young man standing in front of an onion-domed cathedral (St. Basil’s Cathedral, Moscow); a crowd is milling about

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moscovium (paid)

Feb 23, 2024 2 min read

A crystal of silvery metal next to a gray cube

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

Feb 23, 2024 2 min read

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

Feb 21, 2024 2 min read

Movie poster for 1947’s The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer. Image Shirley Temple embracing a confused Cary Grant.

Paid-members only

bachelor (paid)

Feb 21, 2024 3 min read

Calendar for February 2024, including February 29

Paid-members only

leap-year (paid)

Feb 19, 2024 3 min read

Movie poster featuring the head of James Cagney wearing a fedora

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

Feb 19, 2024 4 min read

A crystal of silvery metal next to a gray cube

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molybdenum (paid)

Feb 16, 2024 2 min read

Paid-members only

Valkyrie (paid)

Feb 14, 2024 2 min read

Movie poster featuring the head of James Cagney wearing a fedora

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G-man (paid)

Feb 12, 2024 4 min read

valentine

How 14 February, St. Valentine’s feast day, became associated with love and lovers is shrouded in mystery. We do, however, have a good idea of when it happened, that is some time in the late fourteenth century, and the association was firmly in place by the fifteenth. The earliest

Feb 11, 2024 5 min read

Black-and-white photograph of a man with long hair, a long beard, and wearing a suit

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mendelevium (paid)

Feb 9, 2024 2 min read

Photo of a great-horned owl, a black, white, and brown bird with ears that resemble horns

superb-owl

The NFL championship game is sometimes jocularly referred to as the Superb Owl. Tracing exactly who came up with the coinage is impossible—it was probably independently coined multiple times. The official name of the game, Super Bowl, was coined in 1966. Officially, the name is two words, but is

Feb 8, 2024 3 min read

Australia (paid)

Paid-members only

Australia (paid)

Feb 7, 2024 3 min read

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