Archives
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Lexical Investigations: Genius
When did people shift from having a genius to being a genius? Starting in the 14th century, a genius denoted a guardian spirit, and someone with extraordinary talent was said to have a genius, because his or her gift was thought to be the result of some supernatural help.
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What Are The Names Of Pluto’s Moons?
Like Pluto’s three other moons: Charon, Nix, and Hydra, it’s newest found satellites are named for figures from Greek myth: Styx and Kerberos. But how did the IAU reach this naming conclusion? How did Pluto’s moons get their names? According to their press release, “These names were backed by voters in a recently held popular contest, aimed at allowing the public to suggest names for the …
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Lexical Investigations: Hokey
The story of hokey shows how tangled the backstory of words can sometimes seem to be. Hokey first appeared after World War II as American slang for “overly sentimental” or “contrived. The term’s immediate predecessor seems to be hokum, a blunt American term for “nonsense,” coined earlier in the 20th century by combining hocus-pocus (or hokey-pokey) with bunkum, another word which also means “nonsense.”
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Do e-readers change the way we read?
New words enter English all the time. One major source of new words and senses is technological innovation. If a device is created that didn’t previously exist, it needs a name, and if the device is popular enough, that name, along with other words to describe the functions of the device, enters widespread usage. So how exactly does technological innovation change the way we talk …
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Lexical Investigations: Critical Thinking
Though the phrase critical thinking wasn’t coined until the early twentieth century, its principles can be traced back to Aristotle. The educator and psychologist John Dewey first used the phrase in its modern sense in his 1910 book How We Think, though there are instances of the words appearing together in texts before this time. Dewey defined critical thinking as “reflective thought,” requiring healthy skepticism, …
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Lexical Investigations: Bomb
People have been dropping the word bomb in many different ways for years, and it’s easy to see why: because it’s such a short and evocative word, it’s perfect for slang. At times bomb has meant a large sum of money, a marijuana cigarette, a nice car, and an old beat up car.
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Lexical Investigations: Synergy
Though synergy appears in English texts in a general sense as far back as the seventeenth century, it was not widely adopted as a medical term until the mid-nineteenth century. In medical texts from this time, it often appears in italics as a foreign word. In a revealing passage from 1827, the physician W.P. Allison wrote, “I would object to the term synergy, which some …
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Lexical Investigations: Plagiarism
The Roman poet Martial who lived in first century AD had a problem: without the protection of copyright laws, he couldn’t stop the other poets of his day from circulating his poems as their own. His only recourse was to write witty verses admonishing and mocking the thieves. Of one rival he wrote, “The book you’re reciting, Fidentinus, is mine; but when you recite it …
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Lexical Investigations: Wit
Though today we most often think of wit as a particular kind of humor, historically it has referred more generally to mental faculty. In the time of Chaucer, for example, wit could mean a way of thinking, much as we use mind today in phrases like “we were of one mind” or “he had a mind to.” For many centuries, wit could also refer to …
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Lexical Investigations: Diaspora
The history of the term diaspora shows how a word’s meaning can spread from a very specific sense to encompass much broader ones.Diaspora first entered English in the late nineteenth century to describe the scattering of Jews after their captivity in Babylonia in the fifth century B.C.E.
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Lexical Investigations: Dogma
At the turn of the 17th century, dogma entered English from the Latin term meaning “philosophical tenet.” The Greek word from which it is borrowed means “that which one thinks is true,” and comes ultimately from the Greek dokein which means “to seem good” or “think.” The origin of the word dogma acts as a reminder to English speakers that now-established principles and doctrines were …
