Tag: American Heritage Dictionary
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“Torrential”: a cruelly ironic etymology
There’s only one way to describe the rain deluging Houston, Texas in the wake of Hurricane Harvey this week: torrential. Nearly thirty inches have already fallen over parts of the city as of Monday night, and 20 more inches are still expected. The frequent co-occurrence of these two words, torrential and rain, is called collocation…
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Some etymological—and political—lessons of “condemn”
The word condemn is surprisingly related to the Irish word for “poem.” White supremacists rallied in Charlottesville, Virginia on Saturday, leading to the death of three people, including Heather Heyer, a counter-protester driven down by an Ohio terrorist with neo-Nazi sympathies. It took President Trump a woeful two days to directly condemn this violence and…
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Miscreants, quarry, and records: changes of “heart”
On Valentine’s Day, hearts are everywhere. Candy hearts. Heart emoji. Every imaginable sort of heart-shaped chocolate, greeting card, decorative banner, bric-a-brac. Hearts even swell in our words – and not just the likes sweetheart or, depending on how feel about the holiday, heartsick. I grant you no quarry, you discordant, incredulous, myocardial miscreant! Yes, these…
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The secret of *nem-
Last post, we saw that the math in aftermath has nothing to do with numbers. But two other words I’ve recently covered, numb and nimble, may indeed be all about them, if we do some etymological accounting of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root, *nem-. *Nem- To review, both numb and nimble derive from an Old English verb, nim, functioning much like today’s take, which supplanted…
Mashed Radish 