Default as a noun and default as a verb are the same word, with a familiar English stress shift: nouns often take first-syllable stress, while verbs often take second-syllable stress, as with the different pronunciations of record. A New York City...
Inkhorn terms are showy Latin- and Greek-based words stuffed into English, a label that looks back to the animal-horn ink bottles used by 14th-century scribes. Henry Cockeram’s 1623 The English Dictionarie (Amazon) includes catillate, meaning “to...
Jenny from Portland, Oregon, is fascinated by the language of falconers. In falconry, the word bate means “to flap the wings impatiently.” A similarly spelled verb, which has nothing to do with falconry, figures in the expression to wait with bated...
Beth in Spring Hill, Tennessee, grew up saying bedroom suite and was startled to hear bedroom suit in Georgia and Tennessee. Both forms can mean a matching group of bedroom furniture. Bedroom suit is especially associated with the American South...
The painful condition called shingles takes its name from Latin cingulum, meaning belt, because the inflammation often appears as a belt-like band around the torso. The Latin root of cingulum, cingere, meaning “to gird,” is also the source of cinch...
A young woman who works as a nanny wants to know why the term charge is used to refer to the youngsters she cares for. Charge goes back to a Latin root meaning, “to carry,” and it essentially has to do with being responsible for something difficult...
