Word of the Week

These days, when people say science, they have a particular thing in mind, right? Chemistry, biology, anatomy, physics, etc. But did you know that science used to be a far more general term? The word dates from the 14th century, from the French word of the exact same...

Last week, in talking about the word novel, I mentioned that novels were previously referred to as romances, which of course set us up perfectly for this week's Word. =) Since around 1300, romance meant "a story, written or recited, of a knight, hero, etc." Why were...

I'm not sure how I've managed to go this long without featuring the most obvious word in the world as my Word of the Week ~ Novel ~ but it's high time I remedy that oversight! We're all probably familiar with the two ways novel is used in English today--"A novel idea"...

Saturday as the kids and I were driving Rowyn to a birthday party, they were observing that it was way too warm for fall, and all the trees were still green . . . and Xoë then said, "I don't like that we call it fall. It should be autumn. Why did we ever start doing...

The other day, my husband asked, "So what's the difference between career--as in to career down a hill, the verb, and careen?" To which I brilliantly said, "Uh . . . er . . . I don't know." So naturally, I had to look it up. And it's SO INTERESTING! Let's start with...

Okay, so it's more a letter of the week. 😉 My curiosity over the letter J began in part when I saw a Facebook rant, claiming that we're all in big trouble spiritually because we've forgotten the true name of the Son of the God--that it was Yeshua, not Jesus. The...

Sometimes we have to examine those favorite words. Like pizza. Right? I don't know about your house, but in mine, pizza is a staple. My children adore it. Almost as much as I do. (Hey, I've had more years to grow the love...) So it's no surprise that the other day, as...

My dearest daughter suggested this word of the week, because she thought it was such a fun word to say. 😉 So, bamboozle. This will be rather quick, because etymologists aren't entirely sure where it came from, LOL. What they can tell you for certain is that it's...

I've just returned from a week of vacation in the beautiful Outer Banks of North Carolina . . . which means my schedule is bursting with things that need done. Now, as it happens, I knew from some of my writing projects that schedule would not have been a word used in...

Short and sweet--and funny!--word today. =) Amused. We all know what it means, right? "Entertained. Aroused to mirth." And today, that's true. But did you know that the word originally meant "distracted, diverted, cheated"??? Truth! When amused entered the language...

So this has been a debate in my house in recent weeks. Xoe will say something about being/looking up pictures of/something geared at a tween. Rowyn will reply with, "I hate that word. It's not even a thing. I'm not a tween and I'll never be a tween." To which Xoe will...

Figured I'd jump on the eclipse bandwagon today and talk about a part of it I haven't seen anyone else mention--the word itself! 😉 Eclipse has been in English since around 1300 (since, you know, there was English), taken from French, which was taken from Latin,...

Yesterday, my family and I went hiking at Seneca Rocks. On our way there, we passed a sign that said Watch for West Virginia Wild Life. "I've already seen it," I said. "I saw that groundhog galumphing along." Later last night, my husband was finishing up the first...

So as I was writing last week, trying to finish up the first draft of An Hour Unspent, book 3 in the Shadows Over England Series, I ran into a silly problem. I was trying to have someone describe the hero's little brother. He's a bit of a prankster, but only in an...

You may have seen last week that I posted the video of my recent sermon on blessings and gifts. I figured that, since not everyone has the time to watch a half-hour video, I'd also give you the super-brief summary of what I learned. The English word blessing comes...

A nice and simple word for this week, as it's a super busy one! I don't know if anyone has seen the recent DQ commercials with the silver cloche over the food, but they inspired a question from daughter, who said, "I thought a cloche was a hat." The girl comes by this...

I featured this word before, but it was 6 years ago, and I know much of my readership has changed. And let's be honest--coffee deserves to be featured again. Because it's one of the most beautiful creations in the universe. 😉 The best guess of the awesome...

This isn't one of those words I expected to be surprised by--but I was. So. Waaaay back in the day, in the 1300s, the word boss was in English. But it was a noun meaning "a protuberance, a button." It came from the French boce, which meant "something swollen or...

So last weekend when we were still in Charleston, WV after watching one of the last shows of Ringling Bros and Barnum & Baily (AWESOME), we had the news on in the hotel room. A reporter was interviewing two basketball players after they'd gotten in a fight. Here's...

No, that is not a picture of my dresser. I don't think . . . 😉 So this is another one of those words that is a big part of our everyday language, but which has some surprisingly late additions to it! As a noun, mess has been around since about 1300--as a word for...

Not happy inspiration here, as I thought to wonder about the word as I was typing it into a description of what happened to my computer for the second time in a week--thoroughly and completely went kaput on me [grumble, grumble, growl, growl]. But the word itself is...

Perhaps it's no surprise on the Monday following Holy Week that forsake has come up--I daresay many of us heard again in the last few days Jesus' lament upon the cross. It was some silly wordplay, however, that made me wonder as to the word's etymology. Yesterday in...

As a mom of primary/middle schoolers, cursive writing is a part of our day. But as my kiddos were being their usual snarky selves last week (I've raised them well, what can I say), the question arose of why certain letters look the way they do in cursive. Because yes,...

This might seem like an odd word of the week until you consider I'm a writer, LOL. One who, as it happens, is indeed brainstorming a plot that involves a kidnapping. And yet, I actually read about this word from pure happenstance. 😉 Go figure! Anyway. It's kinda of...

Another lesson learned at Colonial Williamsburg. =) Well, I'm pretty sure I'd learned this before, but not with a nice visual handy... So since the mid 1800s, people have referred to capital letters as upper case and small letters as lower case. This is a direct...

Happy Monday from Colonial Williamsburg! It's Homeschool Days down in CW, so my family and I are here on a 2-day pass. Yesterday we had great fun visiting many of the trade shops and enjoying the early spring weather and flowers (daffodils! In February!). And it's...

Another special request today, though there isn't quite as much information on it as there was on last week's . . . The questions was where the expression "the dickens" comes from. Well, the answer's a bit unclear. What we know is that it's an English last name, taken...

Another Word of the Week request! (Love those--keep 'em coming!) This week for frank as an adjective--made by someone of that name. 😉 Frank is taken directly from the people group, the Franks, who took over Gaul in the Middle Ages and named it for themselves (hence,...

My daughter asked about this one as she was cutting up some paper doilies for valentines she was making. It was a quick answer, but one I'd certainly never investigated before, so I thought I'd share. So doily as we know it is a shortening of doily-napkin, and dates...

I'm always so intrigued when words have come to mean the exact opposite of what they used to. And that, apparently, is what happened (metaphorically, at least) with ace. Round about the year 1300, the word ace entered English. It was taken from the Latin as, which...

Okay, more of a phrase of the week--and this one by special request (happy to report no one's under the weather in my house! Though we had a brief stint of it last Tuesday...) Anyway. So. Everyone knows that under the weather means to feel sick. The question is where...

Last weekend, my daughter asked where the word Bible came from. I had an idea but wasn't 100% sure I was right so looked it up--and indeed found my impression was correct. Bible is a rather ancient word, meaning "the Bible or any large book" back in the medieval days....

Because my blog is sadly lacking in cat pictures, which we all know is the primary purpose of the internet... We have two cats in our family; Lilly is without question our daughter's, and Ivy is more apt to hang out with the rest of us. She's especially fond of...

A quick but fun one, especially in context. =) So, y'all probably know my current series is about thieves. I'm have SO much fun with this. And working pretty hard to make sure each main-character-thief views the world differently than her/his "sister" did in the...

Quick word of the week today, and musical, since I just finished writing A Song Unheard. 😉 In today's vernacular, upbeat means "with a positive mood"--but this is a rather modern connotation, only dating back to about 1947. It's thought to have come from the phrase...

I have long loved the word eccentric for an odd, unique person. Ever since I learned it back in . . . middle school? . . . it was my choice word for those like me. A little different (you know, like someone who has scads of people living in her head begging to have...

I honestly don't remember why I was looking this up . . . but I'll share the results with you anyway. 😉 Sappy in a figurative sense of "foolishly sentimental" has been around for quite a while! Dating from the 1660s, it comes from an intermediate meaning of "wet,...

What primary school student hasn't been correctly at some point for saying "fastly"? I know I was...and I know I've done the correcting too. But last week when my son said something about this, my husband and I decided to look it up (because really, why isn't that a...

At Dictionary.com last week, my attention was grabbed by one of their slideshows about punctuation. Because, yes, I'm a grammar nerd. This has been well established. 😉 But the very first slide was far and away the most interesting to me. & Ampersand Both of...

We have one more week left of summer vacation. One more little week, then back to the homeschool grind we go. Needless to say, that has inspired a few sighs and a whimper or two (okay, perhaps that was more from me than the kids, LOL). With the end of days of freedom...

Class. It seems like a simple word. One that has surely been around forever, right? Well, I looked it up last week because I wanted to make sure that classy was in use for a story. And instead I learned that the whole word was rather surprising. Class comes from the...

Yes, that's right, today's word of the week is German. 😉 In my edits for A Name Unknown, my editor had asked me to check the history of the phrase "culture war," as it felt modern. I'd used this phrase to describe events in Germany at the end of the 19th century,...

If you look up chintzy, you'll find that it means: 1. of, like, or decorated with chintz. 2. cheap, inferior, or gaudy. But these days we don't all know what chintz really is, right? I had some vague recollection that it was a kind of fabric, but that was where my...