Gwen, a sixth-grader in Rosalia, Washington, wonders why indifferent doesn’t mean simply “not different” or “uniquely different.” Her father’s gloss, “not caring,” is the standard sense: apathetic, unconcerned, or having no preference either way...
Does penultimate mean the very last? No! It means second to last, taking from the Latin word paene, meaning almost. It’s the same Latin root that gives us the word for that “almost island,” a peninsula. People misusing penultimate...
Evan from Dallas, Texas, asks whether decimate should only mean destroying one-tenth of something or whether it can mean generally destroying it. The word goes back to a Roman military punishment in which one in ten mutinous soldiers was killed, but...