Posts tagged "etymology"

A door taken off its hinges, then a mind taken off its hinges, then a compliment. The slow journey of a metaphor that still works because of the hinge it pictures.

How a Trojan prince's name became a verb for browbeating. The seventeenth-century London gangs that stole it, and what hectoring still names that argument and anger do not.

An old word for an old kind of joy — where frolic comes from, why its k quietly fell off, and what the word still protects that its more serious cousins do not.