Word of the Week – Phony

Word of the Week – Phony

by | Feb 10, 2025 | Word of the Week

As long as there have been people selling things, there have been people cheating, swindling, and otherwise trying to get more money than something’s worth. And of course, words have evolved to describe those things.

In the late 1780s, one such word was fawney, used especially by the Irish to describe brass rings (fainne means “ring”) being sold as gold.

The word stuck, and then got changed in spelling and pronunciation slightly as it was adopted by the greater English-speaking world. Over the course of the next century, the spelling changed to phoney and then phony, and it went from being specifically a fake-ring to being anything fake or not genuine.

By 1902, it shifted from being strictly an adjective–a property of a thing that was fake–to being used as a noun to describe that ingenuine thing or even person.

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Word of the Week – Interest

Word of the Week – Interest

by | Feb 3, 2025 | Word of the Week

It can be so fascinating to look at the history of incredibly common words. And the history of interest is definitely, well…interesting. 😉

When we think about our common uses of the word today, we probably think first of the meaning “a feeling that accompanies or causes special attention to something or someone.” According to Merriam-Webster, that is the first definition. Second is “advantage, benefit” (think self-interest). Then comes “a charge for borrowed money.” And finally, “right, title, or legal share in something.”

Well, when looking at the history of the word, reverse the order of those definitions. Interest joined English in the mid-1400s, coming to us from French to mean “a claim or legal right.” The French word actually meant “claim or legal harm,” and it in turn came from the Latin word of the same spelling, which means “it is important, it makes a difference.”

So the first meaning of interest was the legal one. Then came the financial meaning, around 1520, then “advantage” around 1620, and our current first meaning of “feeling of curiosity or that something is of concern” didn’t come around until–get this–the 1770s! Who knew it was that recent?!

These are of course for the noun uses, but the verb and adjective variations evolved similarly. Interesting, huh?

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Word of the Week – Wicked

Word of the Week – Wicked

by | Jan 27, 2025 | Word of the Week

With the proliferation of the book, musical, and movie Wicked, I thought it would be fun to look at the history of the word. (Okay, so in fact, I saw a fun article on it on www.EtymOnline.com and that 100% inspired me to borrow the topic, LOL. Click the link to read their very thorough explanation! This is a muuuuuuch shorter version.)

Did you know that wicked witch is actually redundant? They are, in fact, different modern spellings of the SAME Old English word. In Old English, we had the word wicca, the feminine version of which was wicce, which was pronounced like “witch.” Both spellings meant “witch,” and there was also the adjective wick to describe them, meaning “bad, evil, false.”

So why that -ed ending? That’s one of the things that make etymologists smile…or shake their head. The -ed ending implies a past tense verb, but in fact there never was a verb. Wicked, however, developed as if there had been that action word.

The words wicked and witch have of course been separated for many hundreds of years at this point, so it’s reasonable for modern speakers to put them together again for emphasis and to separate them from “good” witches like we see in The Wizard of Oz. Of course, theologians insist that “good witch” is an oxymoron. 😉 But in the realm of fiction, we can appreciate the choice between using power (of any source) for good versus evil.

Have you read or watched Wicked? I confess I’ve yet to see any of the productions, either film or stage. I have the book but haven’t yet read it…I’ve heard, er, conflicting reports on it, LOL.

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Word of the Week – Catalog

Word of the Week – Catalog

by | Jan 20, 2025 | Word of the Week

As someone who studied Ancient Greek in college, I occasionally get excited when I realize that an English word has its roots in that language…and especially when it’s a logos word.

Why? Because logos might mean “word” most specifically, but it means SO MUCH MORE. The logos of things comes up a lot in ancient philosophies. The Biblical Greek word for blessing is a logos word, for example. And of course, the Gospel of St. John begins with Christ as The Word, the logos, through whom all of creation was made.

I had never, however, drawn the connection between catalog and logos, perhaps because I usually favor the British spelling, catalogue. It’s been in the English language since the 1400s, always with the same meaning of “a list of items.” But my husband pointed out recently that’s literally “according to [kata] + the word [logos].” That just struck me as cool. Because a catalog is indeed a word-list of something, and that very word-list is what gives it order. Given that the logos is the thing by which the whole universe was ordered, that’s just cool.

And while I’m not physically the most organized person in the world, I’ve come to really love my catalogs of things like books, especially the ones I’ve read in a year. In 2025, I also started an actual TBR list, with pages for each genre. Do you keep a catalog of anything?

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Word of the Week – Muffle

Word of the Week – Muffle

by | Jan 13, 2025 | Word of the Week

When we think of muffle and mufflers today, we tend to think of things that deaden sound…but that meaning didn’t actually come into English until the 1760s, and it was a direct result of the words’ first meanings: “to cover or wrap something to seal of protect it.” Muffle came to us from French, where moufle means “mitten or thick glove,” implying that the original “cover or wrap” was to protect against cold.

This meaning of the verb muffle dates from the early 1400s, and by the early 1500s, muffler meant a scarf or something worn to protect the face and neck from cold.

Of course, wrapping things up does help deaden sound, so it’s only natural that the meaning began to shift to include that side-effect.

Are you a fan of scarves and gloves? When the weather’s chilly, I rarely go out without them! (My husband and son, on the other hand…)

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Word of the Week – Winter

Word of the Week – Winter

by | Jan 6, 2025 | Word of the Week

Winter is an old word. As in, oooooolllllld. As old as English itself–coming unchanged to us from Old English. And it has always meant “the coldest season of the year” and “the fourth season of the year.”

But where did it come from?

As with most words this old, etymologists can’t trace it definitely. But they can make some good guesses based on other languages and their similar words. In this case, other Germanic languages  have the most similar examples, and they seem to be linked to the Old Norse vetr (pronounced very similar to winter), which means “wet.” But it also seems similar to Gaulish vindo and Old Irish find, which both mean “white.” Either way, winter is clearly the season of wet and cold and snow.

Did you know that Anglo-Saxons counted years in “winters”? Yep!  They even had the word anwinter for things that were one year old or a yearling (think horses etc).

Winter has been a verb (to winter somewhere) since the 1300s, and winterize (prepare for winter) came about with the advent of automobiles in the 1910s.

What is winter like where you live? Here in the mountains of West Viginia and Western Maryland, our winters are usually gray, wet, muddy, and chilly; we get a few snowfalls every year, but mostly our winter is just dreary.

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