Word of the Week – Circumbendibus

Word of the Week – Circumbendibus

by | Aug 17, 2020 | Word of the Week

Circumbendibus. How fun is that word? You can almost guess the meaning just by listening to it, can’t you? This is another selection from that Colonial-era word list I saw, and I absolutely LOVE this one.

Circumbendibus simply means “a roundabout way or process.” Like circumlocution or circuitous. But I love this one because it’s a deliberate joke–it’s mock-Latin, something people put together knowing well it wasn’t the real word, but that it sounded like it.

This word was popular in the late 1600s, and I’m going to make an effort to use it in conversation this week, LOL.

(Then I’m going to start a mock-Latin series on here, because how fun is that?)

Word of the Week – Jollification

Word of the Week – Jollification

by | Aug 10, 2020 | Word of the Week

It’s my birthday week, so I thought it would a fun time to look at this old-fashioned word, popular in the Colonial American era. =)

Jollification is literally “making merry,” from jolly + -ication (“to make”) and dates from the 1760s. Though the adjective “jolly” had been around since the 1300s, jollification actually eventually led to the 20th century slang of jolly (or more often jollies) as a noun, which was just a shortening of jollification. (Think, “she gets her jollies from stamp collecting.”)

This year for my birthday, I decided that some authentic French macarons would make for excellent jollification, so I ordered some from ma-ka-rohn. Because seriously, is there a cookie that looks more celebratory?? I’ve long wanted to try them. If you’ve had them, what did you think? Love them? Hate them?

Word of the Week – Cushy

Word of the Week – Cushy

by | Jul 20, 2020 | Word of the Week

A couple weeks ago a friend sent me a list of “18 English Words That Are Actually Hindi,” and while quite a few of them I knew that about, others really surprised me.

One of those was cushy. I knew that cushy meant “soft” and so I think I always imagined it came from cushion. Cuz, you know…logical, right?

Wrong. Cushy comes directly from the Hindi khush, meaning “pleasant, happy, healthy.” That morphed into “easy” or “soft” by the early 1900s.

Cushion, on the other hand, comes from the Latin via French and has been around since the 1300s. So the fact that these two words sound very similar is largely a coincidence, but also probably has something to do with why the “soft, easy” meaning of cushy really caught on.

Word of the Week – Fence

Word of the Week – Fence

by | Jun 29, 2020 | Word of the Week


Originally posted in May 2015

So, duh moment. Did you know that the noun fence–like, you know, the thing around your yard–is from defense? Yeah. Duh. I’d never paused to consider that, perhaps because the spelling has ended up different, but there you go! It has been a shortening of defense with the same meaning since the 14th century. Then sense of that enclosure followed in the 15th century.

It had a similar verb meaning at the same times too, with the “to sword-fight” way of defending oneself arising in the 1590s.

But the reason I looked it up was for the meaning that has a fence being someone who buys and sells stolen goods…and to fence being to sell those stolen goods. I expected it to be a pretty modern use, but no! As the verb, it’s been around since 1610, and it was then applied to the person doing it right around 1700–all from the idea that it’s accomplished under “the defense of secrecy.”
Word of the Week – Field Trip

Word of the Week – Field Trip

by | Jun 22, 2020 | Word of the Week


This is another revisit…and since we were all sheltering at home for the last months of the school year, one that we’re probably all thinking about with longing. 😉 Coming at you originally from May of 2015, when Rowyn was only 7 and Xoe was 9, which of course gave me all the “awwww”s when I saw the picture I had in this one, from the year before that. 😉 (Still not sure how my babies are now going into 7th and 10th!)

~*~

Since someone asked me about this over the weekend, I figured, hey–already looked it up, might as well share! 😉 Especially appropriate since this is our last week of school. Oh yeah. Right about now the kids are mighty glad we didn’t take a bunch of snow days! 😉

Field trip comes from the idea of field…not as in “an open piece of land, often cultivated” (which dates from time immemorial) but from the idea of field being a place where things happen. This is a slightly newer meaning that began evolving in the 1300s. (I said slightly newer, not new, LOL.) By then it could mean a battleground. And by mid-century, a “sphere or place of related things.” By the mid-1700s people would refer to field-work as anything that took one out of the office or laboratory and into the world, where things take place.

Field trip, then, is a natural extension of this meaning. It’s a trip into the field, going out of the classroom and into the world where the things you’ve been learning about can be found. Though an actually-new phrase (from the 1950s), it has its foundation on a nicely aged idea. =)

My kiddos on a field trip to a one room school house in 2014. Rowyn would be the lonely boy in the boys line, LOL, and Xoe is the one in teal and purple. (No, shockingly, not the one dressed in period attire, LOL.) They had a blast that day, and Xoe even won the little spelling bee!

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