Why does English derive words for some colors, such as blue and orange, from French, but not words for other colors, such as black and white? A fantastic resource about the history of colors is Kassia St. Clair’s The Secret Lives of Color. This is...
Billy from Chilmark, Massachusetts, has heard cunning used for a pretty or especially cute baby, a sense that turns up mostly in the Northeast. The adjective originally had to do with knowing or skill, from the same old root as know, back when...
Mallory, a seventh-grader in Colorado with lots of freckles in a family that mostly doesn’t, asks about freckle. The word is recorded in English as far back as the 14th century, though its deeper origin is uncertain. It probably came through a...
On the spur of the moment means doing something suddenly or spontaneously. The expression comes from a horse rider’s spur, a sharp device used to urge a horse forward. The image is of action encouraged in the moment rather than through a careful...
Kennings are compound words that have metaphorical meanings, such as whale-road meaning “sea.” They’re often found in Anglo-Saxon poetry, such as The Seafarer and Beowulf, but there are modern ones as well, such as rugrats for “small children.” This...
What does the expression egg on have to do with chickens? Nothing, actually. Martha explains why, and tells the story of how the term curate’s egg came to mean “something with both good and bad characteristics.”
