Jonah, a music teacher, in Baltimore, Maryland, shares a funny story about a student who misunderstood his question about the capital of his home state. That left Jonah wondering about the difference between the words capital and capitol. The former goes back to Latin caput, meaning “head” and by extension, the “most important,” “main,” or “great,” giving us terms like capital letter and capital as in “money,” originally, “the first part of a loan,” or in Latin, pars capitalis. Capitol spelled with an O, is used specifically for “the building in which a legislative body meets,” and derives from the Capitoline Hill in Rome, where a magnificent temple of Jupiter once stood. This is part of a complete episode.
According to Gobsmacked: The British Invasion of American English (Bookshop|Amazon) by Ben Yagoda, the word smarmy, meaning “unctuous” or “ingratiating,” may come from a 19th-century magazine contest, in which readers sent in...
Mary Beth in Greenville, South Carolina, wonders: Why do we say four-oh-nine for the number 409 instead of four-zero-nine or four-aught-nine? What are the rules for saying either zero or oh or aught or ought to indicate that arithmetical symbol...
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