Bockety is an adjective, probably from Irish, now entered in the Oxford English Dictionary. It can describe a person who has trouble walking or an object that’s gone rickety or run-down: my bockety old chair, say, or a bockety knee that won’t quite...
In The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (Bookshop|Amazon), Simon Winchester refers to piling Pelion upon Ossa, meaning “making a difficult situation even more difficult.” Pelion...
Alan from Omaha, Nebraska, finds himself turning nouns into verbs, telling his daughter he’s glad she’s old enough to start to human and using jenga as a verb to refer to arranging items carefully, after the game Jenga, which involves...
George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 (Bookshop|Amazon) conjured the indelible image of Big Brother, the terrifying personification of an authoritarian state where all of one’s actions and thoughts are monitored. The book also helped popularize the...
Carl in Vancouver, British Columbia, wonders if it’s incorrect to use the word meat to denote the edible part of an egg. Meat can indeed be used to denote the edible part of a nut, a fruit, or an egg. In Middle English, the word meat referred...
The new movie Dream Horse tells a true story that takes place in a tiny Welsh village. A bartender tries to breed a championship racehorse and persuades her neighbors to chip in. They agree, they say, because they want to do it for the hwyl. The...
