The director of Common Voices Chorus, a women’s choir in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, seeks a word to denote what her group does when they get together to sing simply for the joy of singing and community-building, rather than working toward the goal of performing for an audience in the future. It’s not exactly a rehearsal, so what should they call it? Some words in English have melodious roots in ancient languages that aren’t obvious, but don’t quite fit the bill either. Symphony comes from Greek words that mean “voices together” and Latin cantare, “to sing,” gave rise to English enchantment, and accent, which refers to “song added to speech.” This is part of a complete episode.
If you start the phrase when in Rome… but don’t finish the sentence with do as the Romans do, or say birds of a feather… without adding flock together, you’re engaging in anapodoton, a term of rhetoric that refers to the...
There are many proposed origins for the exclamation of surprise, holy Toledo! But the most likely one involves not the city in Ohio, but instead Toledo, Spain, which has been a major religious center for centuries in the traditions of both Islam and...
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