Tag: politics

• How we got “sacked”

  Yes, getting sacked does originally involve bags.  Just ten days into his new role as White House Communications Director, Anthony “the Mooch” Scaramucci was sacked, as a number of British headlines having been putting his firing while General John Kelly takes over as Trump’s Chief of Staff. Where does this expression, getting sacked, come from?

  John Kelly

  August 1, 2017

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• It’s time for another Friday etymological news roundup

  We had a lot of interesting words in the news this week (some more polite than others). Here’s a news review with—what else?—an etymological twist. 

  John Kelly

  July 28, 2017

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• The sneaky, slinking roots of “mooch”

  Mooch may ultimately derive from an old Indo-European root meaning “darkness” or “silence.”  The new White House Communications Director, Anthony Scaramucci, drew many people to dictionaries last week for his distinctive surname. Scaramucci is indeed related to scaramouch, “cowardly braggart,” originating as a stock character in Italian comedy and familiar to most of us from…

  John Kelly

  July 25, 2017

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• Laughingstock, gaping-stocking, scoffing-stock, and other -stock compounds

  “I think we are pretty close to a laughingstock at this point,” Walter Shaub told the New York Times after he resigned as the head of the Office of Government Ethics earlier this month. Shaub felt the Trump administration’s conflicts of interest, inter alia, are severely undermining his office’s credibility and efficacy, and compelled him…

  John Kelly

  July 18, 2017

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• Digging up “dirt”

  Donald Trump Jr. stepped in some, er, dirt this week when the New York Times revealed he knowingly met with a Russian lawyer who promised dirt on Hillary Clinton as part of the Kremlin’s effort to help Trump. Where does the word dirt come from, and when did it start referring to “compromising information”? As…

  John Kelly

  July 11, 2017

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