Month: May 2015
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scherenschnitte & nunatak
For the second year in a row, co-champions won the 2015 Scripps National Spelling Bee: Vanya Shivashankar landed scherenschnitte and Gokul Venkatachalam stuck nunatak. If etymology was ever useful, it’s certainly in spelling bees. Let’s have a quick look at origin of the winning words. Scherenschnitte For this word, I turned to Merriam-Webster (whose own Peter Sokolowski offered superb live-tweeting of the…
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tassel
Last post, we studied the origin of finale, an appropriate word for this time of year. Come summer, many students finish their final finals. They don their caps. They don their gowns. They endure long addresses. They walk the stage. They receive their diploma (holder). They graduate. In some traditions, students toss the tassels on their mortarboards from the right…
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finale
This week, we witnessed some grand finales in “Mad Men” and “The Late Show with David Letterman.” A finale is all about the ending, of course, but what do we know about the word’s beginning? Finale Finale starts in English as a musical term adopted from the Italian. The Oxford English Dictionary cites it in 1724 as an Italian word…
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the incredible -ulk (part ii)
Last week, the etymologies of hulk and bulk led us to “ships” and “heaps.” How about those two other –ulk words, skulk and sulk? Skulk The ultimate origin of skulk lies in hiding, fittingly enough. The OED first records this verb, signifying “to move in a stealthy manner” or “hide oneself in cowardly manner,” back in around 1225. Etymologists see connections to Scandinavian languages, such as…
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the incredible -ulk (part i)
The Hulk has been smashing the box office in Avengers: Age of Ultron. The U.S. House of Representatives voted to end the N.S.A.’s controversial (and, according to an appeals court, illegal) bulk data collection of phone records. Indeed, -ulk, while a meaningless sound in and of itself*, has been making a lot of noise in the news. Let’s have a…
Mashed Radish 