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Word CountWriters Talk About Writing
Word Tasting Note: "Hubbub"
Is a hubbub simply general hullaballoo, or is it something more threatening?
"What's the hubbub, Bub?" said Bugs Bunny. But, buddy, what is a hubbub? Is it simply general hullaballoo? Or is it something more threatening?
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Topics:
Word Origins
Word CountWriters Talk About Writing
The Story Behind "Fulsome"
Some words are better for writers to leave alone.
Some words travel a winding path to their meanings, causing language users confusion over what they actually mean. A word whose definition or usage is so hotly contested that it never fails to draw attention to itself is called a skunked term. It may be that language users will resolve the problem over time, but until then, what's a writer to do? Today, the story behind fulsome and what to do with this stinky term.
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Erin Brenner of Right Touch Editing provides "bite-sized lessons to improve your writing" on her engaging blog The Writing Resource. Here Erin offers a "word story" on cacophony, which she finds to be "a very apt term for the digital world."
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Word CountWriters Talk About Writing
Word Tasting Note: "Hark"
"Hark! The herald angels sing..." Or is it "Hark the herald, angels sing"?
On his Sesquiotica blog, writer, editor, and designer James Harbeck has a regular feature that he calls "Word Tasting Notes." "Words are delicious and intoxicating," Harbeck writes. "So why not taste them like a fine wine?" Here, he delves into the history of a word we frequently hear (or mishear) during the holiday season: hark.
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Just in time for the holiday season, Merrill Perlman takes a look at the origins of some yuletide expressions.
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Behind the DictionaryLexicographers Talk About Language
The Monstrous Indecency of Hybrid Etymology
There's a long tradition of disparaging words with mixed classical roots.
The word hybrid (from Latin hybrida, "mongrel") commonly refers to animals and plants of mixed lineage, and more recently to vehicles with two or more power sources. In linguistic morphology, it refers to a word formed by combining elements that originated in two or more languages. The process is called hybridization.
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Word RoutesExploring the pathways of our lexicon
The Origins of "Black Friday"
You can thank the put-upon Philadelphia traffic cops.
Today is the day after Thanksgiving, when holiday shopping kicks off and sales-hunters are in full frenzy. The day has come to be known in the United States as "Black Friday," and there are a number of myths about the origin of the name. Retailers would like you to believe that it's the day when stores turn a profit on the year, thus "going into the black." But don't you believe it: the true origins come from traffic-weary police officers in Philadelphia in the early 1960s.
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