The creepy, dystopian, and weirdly wonderful TV series Severance offers a teachable moment in the form of a false etymology in a flaky self-help book by one of the characters. The book suggests that the word camaraderie derives from the type of a...
David from Black Mountain, North Carolina, is fond of the Spanish term that originally meant “someone who shares the same name as another person” (which is one of the meanings of “namesake” in English) and has expanded to...
The editors of the Oxford English Dictionary recently added several Irish English terms. One of them is segotia, which means “friend.” There’s an entry for this word, also spelled segocia, in Grant’s own book, The Official...
The English words vein and vain may be homophones, but they come from completely different etymological roots. Vein traveled into English via Old French veine, which in turn came from Latin vena, meaning “blood vessel.” Vain, meaning...
Diane calls from eastern North Carolina to talk about a phrase her father used if she asked him to repeat something: I never chew my celery twice. He probably conflated the idea of chewing celery with some far more common expressions involving doing...
Damien from New York City, NY, is curious about the term his Hungarian grandmother used for the crust that forms at the corners of your eyes after a night’s sleep. The Hungarian word for eye boogers is csipa, pronounced “CHEE-pah.”...