After our conversation about mini-seasons between the usual winter, spring, summer, and fall, listeners share other examples: stick season in Vermont and mud season in Michigan. The Old English word for “February,” solmonath, may derive...
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...
Need an Old English word for “sneeze”? How about fnēosung? This is part of a complete episode.
The Irish English word bockety describes someone who has difficulty walking, or something that’s fallen into a state of disrepair, as in my bockety old chair. This is part of a complete episode.
Dan from Atlantic Beach, Florida, grew up in southwestern Ohio, where he and his friends and family referred to their neighborhoods as plats, as in “What plat do you live in?” To plat a place is jargon for the process of making a...
The Spanish word candado, or “padlock,” comes from Latin catenatus, meaning “chained,” also the source of the English word concatenation, which means “a series of things,” or literally “links in a chain...