Month: December 2014

• test

  Final exams test your mettle? Perhaps you should have just taken Rocks for Jocks. Etymologically speaking, you kind of did. Test Take rocks, heat them up, and see what kind of good stuff you can get. This is just a test: As the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines it, a test originally referred to the “cupel used in treating gold…

  John Kelly

  December 12, 2014

  Uncategorized

• exam

  It’s finals week at many colleges across the U.S., which means our bug-eyed and heavy-lidded crammers are most certainly weighing topical, etymological matters as they prepare for their final exams. It turns out, though, that the word exam is all about weight–and even bugs. Exam Exam is short for examination, of course. It comes from a Latin…

  John Kelly

  December 9, 2014

  Uncategorized

• ciao, slave!

  After a blogging break, I figured there’d be no better way to say “hello” than to say “goodbye.” Linguistically, the phenomenon is not uncommon, actually. Hawaiian has aloha and Hebrew has shalom, for instance. And Italian of course, has ciao, which has been widely taken up across different tongues as an informal and familiar greeting for “hi” and “bye.” This…

  John Kelly

  December 5, 2014

  Uncategorized