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Pluto
Well over three billion miles from home, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has been sending back a treasure trove of images and information in its historic flyby of the dwarf planet Pluto. A treasure trove indeed, if we look to the etymology of Pluto. Of gods and dogs American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto at the Lowell Observatory in Read more.
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debt
English spelling can be a mess. Take the word debt, making its own mess in Greece as we’ve seen, which features a b we write but don’t say. Whence the b? Debt As it appears in the English of the late 14th century, debt is recorded as dete. No b, for the word comes to English from the Old French dette. No b, as Read more.
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austerity
This past Sunday, Greece voted “No” to the terms – or more austerity measures or policies, as many describe them – of a new bailout from its international creditors. While modern Greece’s economic austerity may be due to the fact that it is in debt to its creditors, the origin of the word austerity is in debt Read more.
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Language “for the birds”: New guest post at Oxford Dictionaries
I have a new guest post up on Oxford Dictionaries’ OxfordWords blog. This one is called “Language ‘for the birds’: The origins of ‘jargon’, ‘cant’, and other forms of gobbledygook.” Here is a sample: ‘Infarction’? ‘Heretofore’? ‘Problematize’? Cathexis? Disrupt? Doctors have their medicalese, lawyers their legalese, scholars their academese. Psychologists can gabble in psychobabble, coders in technobabble. For people outside Read more.
Mashed Radish 