Word of the Week

Another one whose credit goes to my kiddos, who this week asked, "Where did the word Yankee come from?" (We've been reading about the early days of America, you see...) I didn't have the answer to that one off the top of my head, so I popped over to my beloved...

Willy-nilly. It's a phrase I've heard most of my life, and I knew how to use it. But it wasn't until a few years ago, when I was reading an old book and saw it written a different way, that I had a clue where in the world this word came from. In this book, it was...

A week or two ago, my best friend sent me one of those hilarious "someecards" photos on Pinterest that totally sums up my outlook on housework. I love this. But I'm also enough of a grammarian that I had to point out the typo, LOL. I was in college, reading all the...

Last week, I made some truly beautiful southern-style biscuits (click the photo for the recipe). And oh, how delicious they were!! Of course, this being my family, the mere bread itself wasn't the only thing we worked on. My awesome children also had to ask, "So if...

Here we are! A new year, and back on schedule for blogging. =) I had a lovely holiday, and I hope you all did too! So today, back to a word I'd looked up for the last section of The Outcast Duchess. I use it because it rhymes with a character's name, but I had to make...

Okay, there's a debate about this in my house. I made the observation a few weeks ago, when someone on TV mentioned their "bucket list," that I was amazed at how quickly this term became a part of our daily vocabulary, when it was pretty much created by the movie. My...

I found myself looking up the etymology of crime scene the other day. I had a feeling it was a bit modern...and I was right. The original phrase was actually scene of the crime (makes sense) and was coined by Agatha Christie in 1923. But there were some other...

This is one I've wondered about for years but never paused to look up. Behave. As a kid, I would often joke that I was "being have." And I would always wonder what, exactly, "have" was, LOL. Well, I recently said something similar to my kids and decided to look it up....

Hard to believe I've never looked this one up before, eh? LOL My daughter has asked me a few times where the word novel comes from. I had some inkling, knowing my roots and the fact that novel can mean both "something new" and the fiction stories I so adore. But this...

Today's word comes to us by me literally clicking on a random letter at www.EtymOnline.com and then a random page within said letter and scrolling down until something caught my eye. 😉 The lucky word was perk. The first meaning of perk in English came from Old North...

So, my husband made what I deem an incredible etymology discovery this weekend. That isle and island are completely unrelated words, from different roots. Color me baffled. The world island was originally spelled yland, and appeared in 1590...to replace the Old...

My kids made me look this one up the other day, wondering if pig and pigment were related...giving that Xoe's been studying base words and prefixes and suffixes, this is a logical question. =) So away to www.etymonline.com I went. To discover that, as I suspected, no....

Don't you hate it when plans backfire? Ever stop to wonder how long they've been doing it--with that exact word, anyway? No? Well, pause to wonder. 😉 One of the first meanings of backfire to find its way into English was a literal fire--one lit on a prairie to stop...

With all the World Cup stuff going on right now, this one seemed appropriate. And is why my kids asked, "Why do we call it soccer and everyone else call it football?" So naturally, I looked it up. =) As it turns out, soccer comes directly from football...sort of. It...

In the closing scene of The Lost Heiress, my hero is observing that someone has become a bit of a celebrity...so naturally, I had to look it up to make sure that it was in use like that in 1911. I discovered that celebrity comes directly from the Old French and Latin...

While we were in the doctor's office on Friday, we were musing about the biohazard symbol...and wondering what it meant and how it came to be chosen. So thanks to the wonders of smart phones, my hubby looked it up. 😉 I'm just going to quote directly from the source...

A place at which I love to hang out...Seascape by William Trost Richards, 1901 I looked this word up the other day to make sure "get the hang of it" would be an appropriate phrase to use in a book set in 1911--and discovered that there are a plethora of hang uses with...

The honking of a family of geese wandering down to a nearby pond at 5:30 this morning was inspiring, what can I say? 😉 Goose, meaning the water fowl, is not surprisingly old--really old, as old as English. Interestingly, the word's roots were not only for a goose,...

Okay, so no, I wasn't just looking up shoulder. 😉 But in looking up the origins of the phrase cold shoulder for my recently-finished Edwardian, I found several of the uses interesting, so I thought I'd share. Shoulder itself has been in English approximately...

Short but sweet one today. =) I grew up with a perfectionist for a father, so it's a word I've known for, oh, ever. I too can be a perfectionist in a lot of things (housekeeping not among them, ha ha). Never had I thought to look up its etymology, though, until I came...

I've watched a lot of historical shows and movies (shocker, right?). And I've also studied enough historical dialect that I can tell when they get something wrong (well, a lot of the time). And in so, so many, I've heard one character demand of another, "Shut up!"...

Last night I ate an orange. (I know--groundbreaking news, right? LOL) At which point Xoe came in and exclaimed over how lovely my hands smelled. Which prompted her cheeky question of, "Mommy, did you get new cologne?" I, naturally, said, "Now, now. These days cologne...

It's always fun to trace these words that have become names kids call one another...and eventually a banner of pride, LOL. Photo by Tommy Hancher Geek traces its origins back to 1510, surprisingly--and was even used by Shakespeare! The meaning has changed over time,...

Image by Martin Olsson For some reason, I had this image of an hourglass being really, truly ancient. Like Ancient Egyptian kind of ancient. I'm not sure where that idea came from...probably some movie, LOL. Or maybe just the idea of the sands of time obviously being...

Now this is fantastic! C&E Dragon by David Revoy One thing I often flag when I'm editing and have to think about when I'm writing are those words that we use today in a rather un-amazing sense. Words that have come to mean an ambivalent "okay" or "nice." Words...

We have so many beautiful color names, that all describe beautiful shades--which surely existed forever, right? Maybe...but the words sure didn't! So today, a few quick lessons on when some of those shade names joined the English language. =) Indian Pigments (image by...

First of all, my apologies to anyone who missed my Thoughtful Thursday last week--I was taking a sick day. Just a cold, which I'm happy to say didn't get as bad for me as it did for my hubby. Not that I'm happy it involved a fever for the hubby--you know what I mean....

Patent diagram of the first escalator ("revolving stairs") - 1859 This one got me. I admit it. I looked it up during edits on a WhiteFire book because I wasn't sure it was quite early enough in the sense used. And what do I find? A surprise! Escalate is new. Darn new....

A Roman Calendar When I'm writing or editing historicals, much of my word nit-picking relies on gut and ear. If something feels too new or sounds too new (as in, I don't remember reading it in works of the period), I look it up. Which is how I came to look up date...

The Duchess of Chevreuse as Diana the Huntressby Claude Deruet, 17th century We see a lot of historical heroines described as feisty--and why not? It's a great word, right? It means "spirited," right? Wrong. Though I just learned this recently, and now I'm wondering...

The Blizzard by Cornelius Krieghoff, 1860 Given the awful winter weather striking so much of the country this year, this seemed like an appropriate word for the day. =) Though one I can't take credit for coming up with--one of my fellow Colonial Writers, the...