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A collection of 132 posts

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

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bachelor (paid)

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leap-year (paid)

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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

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molybdenum (paid)

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Valkyrie (paid)

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G-man (paid)

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mendelevium (paid)

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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

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Australia (paid)

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Arctic-Antarctic (paid)

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America

The continents of North and South America are named for Amerigo Vespucci (1451–1512). Vespucci made at least two voyages to the New World, one in 1499–1500 and another in 1501–02. He is alleged to have made two others, one before and one after the known voyages, but

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manganese

Beginning chemistry students frequently confuse manganese and magnesium, but the confusion is nothing new. The two were routinely conflated by even the best chemists until the late eighteenth century. Manganese is a chemical element with atomic number 25 and the symbol Mn. It is a hard, brittle, silvery metal with

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mercury-quicksilver (paid)

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bowl-super-bowl (paid)

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I’m Ghosting on Substack

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genocide / ethnocide / cultural genocide

Genocide is a rare case of a word where we know exactly who coined it and when. It is also an example of the not-so-rare case where the legal definition of a term is narrower than the general conception of what the term means. Legal or technical definitions

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magnesium

Not manganese, the other one

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Asia

The origin of Asia, the name of the largest continent, is uncertain. It could from the Hittite name for a land in what is now eastern Anatolia (i.e., Turkey); there is a c.1235 BCE reference to a Hittite victory over the land of Assuva or Asuwa. And Herodotus,

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hootchy-kootchy

An 1890s version of the strip-tease, with the ratio of strip to tease varying with the venue

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lutetium

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2023: My Year in Astrophotography

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boondoggle

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rapid unplanned disassembly (RUD)

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