Word of the Week

At Dictionary.com last week, my attention was grabbed by one of their slideshows about punctuation. Because, yes, I'm a grammar nerd. This has been well established. 😉 But the very first slide was far and away the most interesting to me. & Ampersand Both of...

We have one more week left of summer vacation. One more little week, then back to the homeschool grind we go. Needless to say, that has inspired a few sighs and a whimper or two (okay, perhaps that was more from me than the kids, LOL). With the end of days of freedom...

Class. It seems like a simple word. One that has surely been around forever, right? Well, I looked it up last week because I wanted to make sure that classy was in use for a story. And instead I learned that the whole word was rather surprising. Class comes from the...

Yes, that's right, today's word of the week is German. 😉 In my edits for A Name Unknown, my editor had asked me to check the history of the phrase "culture war," as it felt modern. I'd used this phrase to describe events in Germany at the end of the 19th century,...

If you look up chintzy, you'll find that it means: 1. of, like, or decorated with chintz. 2. cheap, inferior, or gaudy. But these days we don't all know what chintz really is, right? I had some vague recollection that it was a kind of fabric, but that was where my...

Tab is a little word with a long history. I looked it up to check on the age of the phrase "keep tabs on" and found that the word itself goes back to Middle English, where it meant "a small strip or flap of material," interchangeable with tag. From the mid-1400s on,...

No, I don't have a headache. Not today. 😉 But this a word I'd looked up to make sure I could use it in a 1914 setting, so I thought I'd share the interesting pharmaceutical history that went along with it. Aspirin was a trademarked name, created in 1899 by German...

This past weekend was full of ballet for my family, as my daughter danced in her theater's spring show, La Fille Mal Gardée. I've never looked up where the word ballet comes from because, well...it's obviously French, right? As it turns out, yes and no. The English...

The other night, my husband asked if crevice and crevasse were the same word. I, being the spelling nerd that I am, quickly replied that they were spelled differently, and insisted that crevice was a small crack and crevasse a large one. But . . . it did seem like a...

After the release of A Lady Unrivaled in September, my Ladies of the Manor Series will be at an end. And my Society Thieves (if that's the name we keep) Series will begin. Now, given the title of the series, and the fact that the first book, as of this moment (again,...

I was in middle school when I read L. M. Montgomery's Emily series. And man, did I love those! Even more than the Anne series, and that's saying something. I loved Emily especially, you see, because she was a writer. Need I say more? Well, in one of those books, Emily...

Last week after hearing someone from New Zealand refer to themselves as a Kiwi, my hubby got curious as to where that word came from. So I obligingly looked it up. 😉 Apparently the first thing to earn the name was the bird native to New Zealand. It's an imitative...

I always find it interesting to see how very common words have changed over time--and mean is certainly one that has shifted around quite a bit! I'm going to focus solely on the adjective version of the word today, though it's worth noting that through the years, some...

This is a simple one, but likely to be apt today, after I stayed up way too late last night watching the season finale of The Walking Dead. 😉 But I took a nap first. And when my husband came in from working outside right after I got up, I said, "I'm still groggy."...

I hope everyone had a wonderful Holy Week and Lenten season! I know some of you were reading along my 40 Days of Jesus challenge, and others weren't--and now it's back to usual blogging. (Only 3 days a week instead of the 6 of the challenge, LOL.) My next book...

I'm busy working on a new project, which means the chance to look up a bunch of random words as I write them and then go, "Wait a minute. Did that exist yet?" Last week, I looked up brainstorm. I knew I'd looked it up before for a book set pretty early and deemed it...

Last week, one of Xoe's vocabulary words was bedlam. And while her book told her what it means, this is my daughter. She also wanted to know where it came from. So naturally, Mama hops over to etymonline.com And I learned something! I never had any idea where the word...

I am sometimes baffled by how things come into our cultural consciousness...and change over the centuries. Cue the elves. Elf comes from Germanic folklore, with equivalents in Norse and Saxon mythology. The word itself hasn't changed much since Old English in...

Since it's getting rather frosty outside here in the Appalachians, I thought today we'd take a look at ice...or rather, at when some of its idioms came into use. =) Ice itself is from Old English, from Proto-Germanic is. There are cognates for it in quite a few other...

I was surprised to realize this weekend past that the Advent season is officially begun--I thought it would start next weekend, but my calendar is obviously off. 😉 As a child, I knew that advent marked the season leading up to Christmas...but it wasn't until later...

This one is quick--but interesting! Anyway dates from 1560, though it was traditionally two words until the 1830s. And up until modern history, it was quite literally "any way." As in, Is there any way I can help you? I'll get there any way I can. It quite literally...

About a month ago, a lady at our church volunteered to teach knitting classes. Having been crocheting since she was 9 and then knitting as well when she moved to our area and began working in a yarn store, Ms. Judith knows her stuff! I joined mostly because Xoe has...

Last week, Rowyn was reading Amelia Bedelia, who classically misunderstands commands that include words with more than one meaning. Early on in the story, she's working on a list of chores from her employer, who instructs her to "draw the drapes." Naturally, she sits...

At church this week a slight variation in translations of 2 John made us wonder at the difference between the nouns command and commandment. These different translations were using the words interchangeably, but then...why are there two different words? Both have a...

Romance writers are often looked down upon by those who read "serious literature"--and have generally never even picked up anything labeled "romance," yet judge them anyway. And as much as we romance writers rail against that, it's a tale as old as--well, as popular...

Back from vacation, but not quite ready to let go. 😉 And so, today's word of the week will bring us a bit of the beach... Surf began its life as a noun meaning "waves coming ashore" in about 1680, though it was quite likely a variation on suffe, from the 1590s....

It's release week for The Lost Heiress! So in honor of Brook, this week's Word of the Week is one of Brook's favorite things: espresso. Now, according to etymonline.com, espresso didn't come into the English vernacular until 1945. But the Italians had created caffe...

Yes, hat. Not that there's any surprise in the fact that hat itself has been in the English language since the dawn of the English language. But I was interested in some of the idioms containing it. =) Specifically, today I said something about our right as women to...

Today begins our first day of the 2015-16 school year! Xoe is somehow in 5th grade. I don't know how this happened. Isn't she still 5??? And Rowyn, who I swear was 3 just yesterday, is going into 2nd grade. I made the boy-o groan and the girl-o jump up and down with...

Arrr! I occasionally have a pirate in my house--this is to be expected when one has a 7-year-old boy. I never quite know when a rather adorable little figure is going to appear with his sword in hand and demand all my booty. But last time he did, his sister--being so...

No, not in honor of Donald Trump. 😉 The question arose this past week with my hubby and son, as to where "fired" and "sacked" come from. So naturally, I ran out to my computer to answer it. Fire, as in to terminate employment, is an Americanism from about 1885...

Yesterday my hubby called our daughter "The apple of my eye," and she looked at us like we were off our rocker. "The apple? How does an eye have an apple?" Good question, my girl. Good question. =) The word apple has been in English as long as there was English to be...

Not to be gruesome or anything. 😉 I was looking this one up to see when the phrase "skeleton in the closet" came about. Skeleton itself first arrived in English in about 1570, meaning a mummy, dried-up body, or bone remains. The word came from Latin, but the Latin...

My son is 7. Which means he's obsessed with dinosaurs. Which means that he was in 7-year-old heaven when the new Jurassic World movie came out. Given that he has a really great grasp of "it's just a movie using robots and special effect"--we watched behind the scenes...

Scalawag is one of those words that we think of as being a very old-fashioned insult--and it is...but it's not quite as old as some might think. Meaning "disreputable fellow," scalawag only dates from 1848. It originated in American union jargon, and though where it...

One of my husband's favorite shows is Top Gear--the British version. Being a car show, they have cause to say lots of things that are different than how we say it in America. Boot, bonnet...and aluminium instead of aluminum. On one particular show, the presenter is...

It's going to be a fun week around Writing Roseanna...so I thought I'd start us off with some fun, happy words. =) I suppose I should start with the root word, cheer. The earliest English reference to word, from about 1200, was from the Anglo-French chere, and meant...

We've all heard it through the grapevine (and some of us might break into song at the mere mention...), but do you know where the saying comes from? I didn't--but I learned recently so thought I'd share. =) Grapevine, meaning "a rumor" or "information spread in an...

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...

My kiddos on a field trip to a one room school house last year 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...

Many many moons ago, well before I discovered www.etymonline.com (for that matter, well before my daughter was born...I believe I was in college...) I was writing a story in which the heroine accused the hero of being a fanatic about football. He replied that he was...

Since I wrote on the origins of hello last time, my daughter said that I had to look up hi for this week. =) So here we go! Far simpler than hello, LOL. Hi is most assuredly an Americanism, a greeting whose first recorded reference is from 1862. Interestingly, it's...

I can't tell you how many times I've looked up the etymology of hello...but for some reason, I've never shared. Obviously time to remedy that! So the life of hello began with Old High German's hala, hola. It was an imperative form of halon, holon, which meant "to...

My not-so-fabulous shot of the earth as seen at FSU's planetarium Last week, we were super excited to get to visit a local university and see the planetarium with our homeschool group. And of course, this being my family, the night before we were talking about the...

This one made me go, "Ha! Take that, everyone who uses the word I don't like!" 😉 See, I was always a normality girl. But more and more often I'd begun hearing normalcy. And it drove me batty. Here, my friends, is why. Normality itself is a relatively new word,...