What’s the linguistic connection between pretend and pretension or pretentious? They all go back the Latin praetendere, meaning to put something forward. This is part of a complete episode.
Although in English we have the terms orphan, widow, and widower, our language lacks a one-word term that means “bereaved parent.” A few other languages have a word for this, including Hebrew sh’khol and Sanskrit vilomah. This is...
A Dallas, Texas, caller says his girlfriend from a rural part of his state has an unusual way of pronouncing certain words. Email sounds like EE-mill, toenail like TOW-nell, and tell-tale like TELL-tell. These sounds are the result of a well-known...
Awesome and awful may have the same root, but they’ve evolved opposite meanings. Awful goes back more than a thousand years, when it originally meant “full of awe” and later “causing dread.” Awesome showed up later and...
Snarky refers to someone or something “irritable,” “sharply critical,” or “ill-tempered.” It goes back to a 19th-century word meaning “to snort.” This is part of a complete episode.
The saying “to boot” comes from an Old English word bot, meaning “advantage” or “remedy.” It’s related to the contemporary English words better and best, so if something’s “to boot,”...