A delightful new book offers a taste of life in early medieval England through everyday vocabulary of that time and place. It’s called The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English, by Hana Videen (Bookshop|Amazon). The book includes helpful vocabulary lists and pronunciations, as well as information about Old English kennings, or poetic compounds of words, such as the ones that translate as “sky-candle” to indicate the sun, “whale-road” indicating the sea, and “sea-guest” to mean “sailor.” For an Old English word of the day, follow Old English Wordhord on Twitter. Incidentally, even if you don’t understand Old English, it can be mesmerizing to listen to. Check out this reading of “Widsith,” and this one of “The Wanderer,” and this one the opening lines of the epic poem Beowulf. This is part of a complete episode.
A member of the ski patrol at Vermont’s Sugarbush Resort shares some workplace slang. Boilerplate denotes hard-packed snow with a ruffled pattern that makes skis chatter, death cookies are random chunks that could cause an accident, and...
A resident of Michigan’s scenic Beaver Island shares the term, boodling, which the locals use to denote the social activity of leisurely wandering the island, often with cold fermented beverages. There have been various proposed etymologies...
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