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Q: I was discussing well-being this morning and wondered about its antonym. AI says “the opposite of wellbeing is often considered to be illbeing, which refers to a state of poor [...]
Q: Where or when did the phrase “cutting corners” show up? A: When the usage first appeared in writing in the early 19th century, it had to do with riders [...]
‘Q: I am used to reading older texts that use “my” before consonants (“my love”) and “mine” before vowels (“mine eyes”). But once in a while I see them used [...]
Q: News articles often say an issue is “on the table,” meaning being considered. But “tabling” the issue means putting it off. Can you shed light on these opposite meanings? [...]
Q: I recently encountered a sentence about the need for “state and local leadership on immigration.” This use of “on” strikes me as lazy and inconsiderate of syntax. It’s probably [...]
Q: Why a “meteoric rise”? Meteors crash down on Earth. A: The use of “meteoric” for something that rises may seem counterintuitive, but the adjective has been used that way [...]
Q: “Making the cut” is said to originate from golf, but it might equally be said to have its roots in early moviemaking. Which came first? A: The expression “make [...]
Q: Over the last decade I’ve been seeing an uptick in the use of “drop” to mean something new being released, like a podcast episode or music album. Where does [...]
Q: How can we get everyone to quit using “loose” when they mean “lose”? It’s driving me insane! A: The word “lose” is usually a verb with the sense of [...]
Q: How was the definite article that we now see in the faux-archaic names of ye olde shoppes actually pronounced in Old English and Middle English when it was written [...]
Q: In a NY Times obituary, a historian refers to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as “arrogant, literate, obdurate, revengeful,” etc. Is it not odd to describe an Islamic scholar as “literate,” [...]
Q: Robert Herrick uses “ye” during most of “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time,” but switches to “you” at the end. Are both ”ye” and “you” in the [...]
Q: In Jen Beagin’s 2023 novel Big Swiss, Flavia asks Om, her sex therapist, whether “adult” and “adultery” are related. He says they aren’t. Huh? Could that be right? A: Yes. [...]
Q: Having been sucked down many a “rabbit hole” in my reading, I’m wondering how this figurative sense of the phrase developed. Did it appear before Alice in Wonderland was [...]
Q: I am wondering how chimera has come to mean both “an imaginary monster compounded of incongruous parts” and “an unrealizable dream.” A: When “chimera” originally appeared in ancient Greece as [...]
Q: I was reading an op-ed that had this quote from Abraham Lincoln’s Cooper Union Address: “That is cool.” At first I thought it was satire, but he did indeed [...]
Q: Here’s the title of a post on a blog I follow: “More osculation of religion by the NYT and Free Press.” I’m not aware of this figurative use of [...]
Q: Can euphemisms turn into dysphemisms and vice versa? If yes, why does it happen? A: Yes, euphemisms can turn into dysphemisms, and vice versa. The change from a euphemism [...]
Q: Was it ever normal to rhyme “misery” and “high”? I’m thinking of a couplet (“Make safe the way that leads on high, / And close the path to misery”) [...]
Q: I saw this headline over an NPR article: “VP Vance tries to progress Gaza ceasefire.” Is that a permissible use of “progress”? I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen it [...]
Back in 2010 I posted about the death of Sol Steinmetz, rabbi and etymologist; now a longtime LH reader has sent me a copy of his 2008 book Semantic Antics: [...]
Beth of the Cassandra Pages is an old friend (my wife and I visited her in Montreal in 2004: 1, 2) and it’s always a pleasure to hear from her; [...]
As anyone who has been following LH for any length of time will be aware, I am no fan of “AI,” but this seems like a situation in which large [...]
The poet Tony Harrison has come up here before (and I am sad to learn from that Wikipedia article that he died last year); all poets deal in language, of [...]
I keep running across the term découpage in learnèd discussions of movies and not knowing what it means, so I decided to find out — doubtless not for the first [...]
Courtesy of Stu Clayton, a brief and enjoyable video clip in which two guys try to guess the ten most spoken languages in the world (lumping together first- and second-language [...]
Ben Yagoda at Not One-Off Britishisms discusses a phrase I was familiar with but didn’t realize was making inroads over here: I see that only once in the history of [...]
One of those silly but enjoyable online quizzes, from Isabella Kwai at the NY Times: “Hey, Bampot! Can You Tell Real British Insults From Fakes in This Quiz?” (archived). The [...]
I enjoyed all of Edward Mendelson’s NYRB review (archived) of Zadie Smith’s play The Wife of Willesden (a riff on Chaucer’s Wife of Bath); here I will excerpt a section [...]
The Economist reports on a little-known linguistic enclave (archived): Introducing House Bill 561 to the Idaho Legislature, Ted Hill did not expect to stoke international controversy. The law, which originally [...]
I’m finally getting around to Richard Tarrant’s Texts, Editors, and Readers: Methods and Problems in Latin Textual Criticism, which bulbul gave me back in 2018, and I thought I’d quote [...]
This is the kind of thing that enrages me; Natricia Duncan and Anthony Lugg report in the Guardian: When the Jamaican MP Nekeisha Burchell stood up to give her maiden [...]
I was reading about a recent documentary called Nuestra Tierra (apparently translated as both Our Land and Landmarks), which “examines issues of land ownership in Argentina and interrogates the role [...]
Boris Dralyuk, an old bloggic friend (dating back to 2012), has an essay in Poetry about looking backward: Pain is at the core of nostalgia, a term that a Swiss [...]
Two unrelated things I’ve enjoyed recently that can be shoehorned in here via their relation to language and/or communication: 1) Ildikó Enyedi has been one of my favorite directors ever [...]
A NY Times interactive story about “the world’s rarest pasta,” by Matt Goulding, is interesting on a number of counts. Of course if one likes pasta it’s great to see [...]
Andrew Keh reports in the NY Times (archived) about a divergence in pronunciation that astounds me as much as if you told me a lot of people pronounced New York [...]
Ben Yagoda discusses a niche usage that produces hilarity among a restricted group of English-speakers: In the language wars, I am pretty firmly a descriptivist (rather than a prescriptivist) but [...]
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