In a rather imaginative assessment of the Civil War during an interview with Salena Zito of the Washington Examiner, President Trump called Andrew Jackson a “swashbuckler” who could have avoided the American Civil War. Putting aside Trump’s grasp of American history, let’s get a firmer grasp on the history of his colorful word, swashbuckler.
Continue reading “Cheeky hogwash? The origin of “swashbuckler””
One of the earliest recorded instances of wiretapping involves an anecdote about how Confederate general John Hunt Morgan bet a Union soldier two cigars if he could spell the word Lebanon.
In a series of shocking tweets this weekend, President Trump, providing absolutely zero evidence, said President Obama wiretapped his phones during the 2016 campaign. The word wiretapping evokes Watergate and Cold War espionage, but its roots goes back a century earlier. For before we tapped telephones, we tapped telegraphs.
Continue reading “From telegraphs to Twitter: a short history of “wiretapping””
