Blog posts tagged "etymology"

3 posts found

Word of the Day
Unhinged

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.

Word of the Day
Hectoring

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.

Word of the Day
Frolic

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.