Word of the Week

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...

Tab is a little word with a long history. I looked it up to check on the age of the phrase "keep tabs on" and found that the word itself goes back to Middle English, where it meant "a small strip or flap of material," interchangeable with tag. From the mid-1400s on,...

No, I don't have a headache. Not today. 😉 But this a word I'd looked up to make sure I could use it in a 1914 setting, so I thought I'd share the interesting pharmaceutical history that went along with it. Aspirin was a trademarked name, created in 1899 by German...

This past weekend was full of ballet for my family, as my daughter danced in her theater's spring show, La Fille Mal Gardée. I've never looked up where the word ballet comes from because, well...it's obviously French, right? As it turns out, yes and no. The English...

The other night, my husband asked if crevice and crevasse were the same word. I, being the spelling nerd that I am, quickly replied that they were spelled differently, and insisted that crevice was a small crack and crevasse a large one. But . . . it did seem like a...

After the release of A Lady Unrivaled in September, my Ladies of the Manor Series will be at an end. And my Society Thieves (if that's the name we keep) Series will begin. Now, given the title of the series, and the fact that the first book, as of this moment (again,...

I was in middle school when I read L. M. Montgomery's Emily series. And man, did I love those! Even more than the Anne series, and that's saying something. I loved Emily especially, you see, because she was a writer. Need I say more? Well, in one of those books, Emily...

Last week after hearing someone from New Zealand refer to themselves as a Kiwi, my hubby got curious as to where that word came from. So I obligingly looked it up. 😉 Apparently the first thing to earn the name was the bird native to New Zealand. It's an imitative...

I always find it interesting to see how very common words have changed over time--and mean is certainly one that has shifted around quite a bit! I'm going to focus solely on the adjective version of the word today, though it's worth noting that through the years, some...

This is a simple one, but likely to be apt today, after I stayed up way too late last night watching the season finale of The Walking Dead. 😉 But I took a nap first. And when my husband came in from working outside right after I got up, I said, "I'm still groggy."...

I hope everyone had a wonderful Holy Week and Lenten season! I know some of you were reading along my 40 Days of Jesus challenge, and others weren't--and now it's back to usual blogging. (Only 3 days a week instead of the 6 of the challenge, LOL.) My next book...

I'm busy working on a new project, which means the chance to look up a bunch of random words as I write them and then go, "Wait a minute. Did that exist yet?" Last week, I looked up brainstorm. I knew I'd looked it up before for a book set pretty early and deemed it...

Last week, one of Xoe's vocabulary words was bedlam. And while her book told her what it means, this is my daughter. She also wanted to know where it came from. So naturally, Mama hops over to etymonline.com And I learned something! I never had any idea where the word...

I am sometimes baffled by how things come into our cultural consciousness...and change over the centuries. Cue the elves. Elf comes from Germanic folklore, with equivalents in Norse and Saxon mythology. The word itself hasn't changed much since Old English in...

Since it's getting rather frosty outside here in the Appalachians, I thought today we'd take a look at ice...or rather, at when some of its idioms came into use. =) Ice itself is from Old English, from Proto-Germanic is. There are cognates for it in quite a few other...

I was surprised to realize this weekend past that the Advent season is officially begun--I thought it would start next weekend, but my calendar is obviously off. 😉 As a child, I knew that advent marked the season leading up to Christmas...but it wasn't until later...

This one is quick--but interesting! Anyway dates from 1560, though it was traditionally two words until the 1830s. And up until modern history, it was quite literally "any way." As in, Is there any way I can help you? I'll get there any way I can. It quite literally...