Wild Word Friday! When you study languages and find an unusual looking or sounding word that is similar or the same in many languages, you’ve probably stumbled upon the verbal evidence of some widespread historic happening. HORDE is a just such a word. English: HORDE; German: HORDA; French: HORDA; Polish: HORDA. All come from the…
Wild Word Friday! I really didn’t know that such a thing as a SEICHE (pronounced saysh) even existed until I saw one in our bay. So what am I talking about? Some strange extraterrestrial being? An exotic fresh water fish species? Nope. I’m talking about the tendency of an enclosed body of water to churn …
Wild Word Friday! I love to hear about the Scripps National Spelling Bee each year – hear about it, not watch it, because my heart aches too much for those who don’t quite make it to that coveted last-person-standing place of honor. The winner this year was Snigdha Nandipati, and the last word she…
Wild Word Friday! To be perfectly honest, OID is not a word. It’s actually a syllable, and it comes to us from the Greek suffix -oeides, which is used to indicate a form or a shape. In other words, OID indicates that something is like something else. That’s exactly how we use this suffix…
Wild Word Friday! Those of us living in the USA are enduring a pre-election season of skirmishes, interviews and civilized (and some uncivilized) vitriol. So I suppose that when you see the word POLL you immediately think of all the commotion and aggravations that seem to be a part of an election year, but let’s…
Wild Word Friday! In researching the word SARCASM, I discovered that it definitely deserves the title Wild Word. SARCASM isn’t usually a part of my repertoire, but a couple of years ago a person told me that they were going to do something which I knew would hurt the feelings of an elderly person dear…
Wild Word Friday! If you lived thousands of years ago, your choice of clothing materials would have been pretty much limited to animal skins, especially if you lived where winters loomed fierce and cold. A few groups of people wore birdskins (the Aleuts of ancient Alaska, for example), but before anybody figured out how…
Wild Word Friday! Our word today – JUBILEE – comes to us from the ancient Hebrew via a long journey through Europe. Every fifty years, according to a law that has been recorded in the Old Testament book of Leviticus (chapter 25, verse 10): “And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty…
Wild Word Friday! SWARD is one of those words seldom heard in modern English. As a noun, it’s used to designate a grass-covered area or a field. As a verb it means to cover or become covered with grass. SWARD traces its roots to an Anglo-Saxon word, sweard, which means a skin or hide. In…
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