Hypochondria derives from the Greek preposition hypo, meaning “under,” as in the hypodermic that goes under the skin, and hypothermia, the condition of being insufficient heat. The -chondria in hypochondria comes from Greek chondros...
Are the words proctor and proctologist connected? No. The word proctor, as in a university proctor who supervises or monitors students, derives from Latin procurator, from words meaning to “care for” or “advocate for,” from...
What sort of language is worthy of being inscribed in stone? A frieze on the James A. Farley Building in New York City is inscribed with Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their...
Listeners continue to invent names of Greek gods by pronouncing familiar words with the accent on the wrong syllable. There’s Mediocrities, god of “things that are just pretty much okay”; Lotteries, “the god of random...
Sidney in Boston, Massachusetts, is curious about the diaeresis, that pair of dots that occasionally appear over a vowel in words such as naïve and coöperate. In ancient Greek diairesis, meaning “division,” applied to those dots in...
Andrew from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, recalls a phrase his grandmother used: You’ve got to eat a peck of dirt before you die. A peck is a unit of dry measure equal to a quarter of a bushel. Peck is also a term of approximate measure, as in to...