Ever since I was a kid, I was taught to look up words I didn’t know in the dictionary. I used to think it was because the grown-ups were too busy to explain the meaning (or maybe I was being a pest). But now I can’t help but wonder whether …
One could say that bold words enter the language shouting. An example would be the word AIDS, which was coined in the early 1980s, probably by a journalist, as an initialism for the descriptive medical name of the disease: acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. Because the disease burst upon the world so devastatingly, the word AIDS …
When I took on the commitment, a year ago, of contributing blog postings about language, I began bravely by tossing out a little ditty that came into my mind, inspired by Dr. Seuss: “New words, old words, shy words, bold words.” Well, I’ve talked about old words and new words, …
Old words are just as interesting as new words. But how old is old? We use a good number of words today that go all the way back to Old English, the language of the Germanic peoples who invaded and then settled in England in the fifth century A.D. These …