Wild Word Friday! To consider the origin of the word GOBBLE, we need to go back to the Celts, who gave us the word gober, meaning to gulp down or swallow. From gober we get gobbet, a morsel of food, particularly meat, and we also find the related word, gob, in various Gaelic dialects, which…
Wild Word Friday! Harrison Summer Memories… I cannot site any linguistic source to back my claim, but I’m sure that one of the first words in any human language was FIRE. I can, however, cite a very ancient word that has come down to English through thousands of years nearly unchanged from the Indo-European language…
Wild Word Friday! Do you remember when you were a kid and there was something absolutely delicious about being pretend-scared? Not truly afraid, just pretend-scared. When children go out to trick-or-treat, they dress up like monsters and GOBLINs and black cats and ghosts and pretend to be scary, and, when they come to our doors…
Wild Word Friday! I really, really don’t like to have sticky fingers, which is why I’m so grateful that someone invented the FORK. In the history of mankind – and womankind – the FORK is a fairly recent development, although in 1290 Fra Bonvicino da Riva (from Italy) wrote this advice to diners: “Let thy…
Wild Word Friday! If you hear someone say, “What’s the SCUTTLEBUTT?” you know that s/he is referring to the latest gossip. But where on earth did we get a word like SCUTTLEBUTT? Well, at first let’s do a little historical research. SCUTTLE comes to the English language from the Old French word escoutille, which means…
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…
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