Wild Word Friday! HUM is one of those glorious onomatopoeic words that is an imitation of the sound it describes. The earliest form of HUM that we know of – onomatopoeic words can have very obscure localized origins – comes from the Middle English hummen, which almost makes your mouth vibrate when you say it….
Wild Word Friday! All the meanings of the word CRAB – a shellfish with pincers, a louse, an unpleasant and sour person – all come to us along various routes from the same Indo-European wordbase gerbh-, which means to scratch. At first that may seem like a strange meaning to have spawned all those various…
Wild Word Friday! When I hear the word PALE I usually think of the color of my skin. But there is an older nearly obsolete meaning for the word PALE , which comes to the English language from the Latin word palus, a stake. A PALE was a pointed, narrow, upright piece of wood. Generally,…
WILD WORD FRIDAY! When I hear the word BELFRY, I immediately think of churches and the beautiful sound of bells chiming across a sleepy town, so I was surprised to discover that, originally, a BELFRY was a wooden siege tower, used to help soldiers as they tried to scale and break through the thick stone-walled…
I belong to readers group. We meet once a month, September through May, and we usually read books that fall into the general category of secular literary novels. But for this month, we decided on a book that is a little different from our usual fare. We’re reading Ann Voskamp’s memoir, ONE THOUSAND GIFTS. I’m…
Wild Word Friday! When I was almost eight years old, my family and I were visiting my maternal grandfather. My brother Bob and I called him Granddaddy. He was a wonderful grandfather, a widower, who doted on us grandchildren. While we were at his house, I started feeling rotten, really, really rotten. By the…
Wild Word Friday! It probably won’t surprise you to know that the English language borrowed the word YEN from the Chinese language, the Cantonese dialect. To the ears of an English-speaker, YEN sounds Chinese. During the mid-1800s when Chinese immigration to the United States peaked, they brought the word in-yan with them. In-yan means…
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