Jason in Barre, Vermont, wonders if there’s a connection between the words casual and casualty. Both belong to a family of words involving the idea of falling, deriving from Latin cadere, to fall, and its past participle, casus. From the same...
Inspired by a Twitter thread about things people learned surprisingly late in life, Martha relates an extremely embarrassing story of her own about her misunderstanding how beer is made. This is part of a complete episode.
Scarecrow and pickpocket are compound words that name things and people by describing what they do. Such nouns were especially popular centuries ago, when quake-breech meant a coward, a saddle-goose was a fool, a scrape-gut was a violinist, and...
Clementine, a young caller from Omaha, Nebraska, wonders why we use the term run-of-the-mill to describe something ordinary. The expression originates world of manufacturing, where a run of the mill is the entire run of things being produced...
In our online discussion about the variety of things we call our pets, one woman shares how her pet’s name went from Lucy to Queen of the Universe. Sounds like a perfectly natural progression to us! This is part of a complete episode.
Agathism is the doctrine that all things ultimately tend toward good, even though the means by which that happens may be evil or unpleasant or unfortunate. The word comes from Greek agathos, meaning good, which is also the source of...