Frugal is a great word for thrifty people because it glorifies the idea of saving without any of the negative connotations of cheap or miserly. English speakers started using frugal at the turn of the 17th century. While the noun form had already existed in English since the 1530s, the earliest citing of the adjective form is not until Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor about …
The exact origin of motley is uncertain, but it’s likely to have come from the Middle English word mote, meaning “speck.” It makes sense then that mottled and speckled have similar meanings. Mottle is actually a back formation of motley.
By Rebekah OttoRecently the wordsmiths of the United States have availed themselves once again to decry the figurative use of the word literally. This particular spate of analysis finds its origins in a Reddit post titled, “We did it guys, we finally killed English,” which featured an image of Google’s definition for the word. Since that popular post, journalists and language experts have added their voices to …
This may come as a surprise, but the link between sustainability and environmentalism is actually fairly recent. Before 1980, sustainability was an uncommon variant of sustainable, as in “capable of being upheld,” and it could be used in any context. But in 1980 that all changed when the International Union for the Conservation of Nature published the World Conservation Strategy, including an entire section called …
Though the phrase soul mate gained steam toward the end of the twentieth century, the idea goes all the way back to Plato’s Symposium, written in 385–380 BCE. In Symposium, when the two dialogists discuss love, Aristophanes tells Socrates that human beings used to have four arms, four legs, and two faces, and they were happy and complete.
The origin of the word fiat in English is connected to the origin of the world itself. Taken from the Latin meaning “let it be done,” this word appears in the Latin translation of Genesis, the first book of the bible, when God proclaimed “let there be light” (fiat lux). As a result, many early uses of fiat were biblical allusions, as in John Donne’s …
Over the last few years, lovers of language have casually observed an increase in speakers beginning sentences with the word so. What are some new ways in which so is being used in colloquial speech, and what cues do these utterances send to listeners? Consider the following example: Speaker 1: Dr. Johnson, when did you start studying this disorder?Speaker 2: So, I had noticed certain …
As a noun and a verb, the word stuff has had many lives, dating all the way back to the 1300s. The sense of wool and cloth is chiefly British. In the nineteenth century, a junior barrister was called a “stuff gownsman,” because his robes were made of wool, unlike a barrister appointed to the Queen’s Council, who was called a “silk gownsman,” and whose promotion …
In 2013, the Sunday Times outed J.K. Rowling as the author of the detective novel The Cuckoo’s Calling, published under her nom de plume Robert Galbraith. While devotees of Rowling quickly procured and binge-read her latest work, linguists and language lovers worldwide celebrated the computational analysis of the two scholars who helped reveal the true author of the book in question. How did experts figure …
Today’s meaning of paragon as a model of excellence has been around since the Middle French of the 1540s, but before then, this word’s history is a bit more complicated.
Outlier was such a useful and long-established term that, in 1865, geologists coined inlier, so that they could have a contrasting word with the opposite meaning. So why has inlier fallen into disuse today? Maybe it’s because people and things that exist outside the mainstream are inherently more interesting, and therefore are more talked about. Today, outlier can refer to a political maverick, a musical prodigy, …
When it comes to the word noble, the senses “royal” and “distinguished” are probably quite familiar, but there are many other uses of this word that might surprise you. Just as a noble person of virtue can resist manipulation, since the 14th century, stones and metals that resist corrosion are also said to be noble.
