Master for Webs

We can’t resist anymore; today we face down the various usage issues surrounding the term anymore.

First the easy part: is the adverb anymore properly spelled as one word or two? The one-word styling is more common nowadays (or should we say, “the one-word styling is more common anymore”?), but the two-word form is still perfectly acceptable. Just remember that there is a difference between the adverb anymore (”We don’t go out anymore”) and the phrase any more where more acts as a pronoun or an adjective (”I can’t eat any more pizza”). In the latter case, any and more are always distinct words.

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Uhrichsville, Ohio, which bills itself as the Clay Center of the World, begins its National Clay Week Festival today. Humans have been using that earthy, plastic material for more than a thousand years; today we look at some old words still used to talk about materials argillic (that is, “of or relating to clay”).

Potters have a number of special terms for clay-specific processes. For example, the process of making slip, a mixture of clay and water used to both decorate and cement clay, is known as blunging. The verb blunge (meaning “to beat up and mix in water”) is itself a mix of blend plus plunge; the clay-based noun slip has an ancestor in the Old English word for “slime.”

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When you hear the word secretariat you probably think of important government officials or key United Nations administrators. The offices of any secretary (such as the Secretary of the Treasury) can also be called a secretariat, as can the secretarial or clerical staff of an organization.

All these senses are true to the history of the word secretariat, which (since the days of Medieval Latin) has meant basically “secretary” or “confidante.” But official officers and efficient clerical staff aren’t what we had in mind when we introduced the subject of secretariat.

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Supposedly, it was on this date in 1652 that the first mint ever was established (somewhat illicitly) in the colonies. “Somewhat illicitly?” Well, for 30 years, every coin produced at the mint was dated 1652, in an effort to conceal the continuous mintage from the British authorities in London. Today we celebrate that early mint by minting our language for mint words.

We can thank the ancient Romans for the monetary mint that names the place where coins are made. When the Romans established a mint at a temple of the goddess Juno Moneta, the epithet moneta became a generic Latin term for a place where money is made. Moneta meandered through Europe and eventually into Old English, Read the rest of this entry »

On June 11, 1969, David Bowie’s Space Oddity hit the airwaves. If you remember when the song first came out, you may also remember that its release was timed to coincide with Apollo 11’s mission to the moon. Our linguistic connection to the tune is an odd one — literally — as we look at the word odd and some of its quirky offspring.

Odds are, you’re familiar with the adjective odd, but you may have never heard about odd’s ancestor oddi. That Old Norse term names a point of land, a triangle, or an odd number.

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June 14 is Flag Day, a day commemorating the official adoption of the U.S. Flag in 1777. As the original star-spangled banner turns 222, we look at the far longer history of the flag.

We don’t know whether the very first flag was waved in ancient China or ancient India, but we do know that those standards (standard names the often elongated flag of an individual, cause, party, or unit, especially one serving as a rallying point) were used in both countries 1,000 years ago. In China, where the early royal flag was treated as if it were the king himself, touching the flag-bearer was a crime. In India, the flag was the first object of attack in battle, and its fall meant confusion if not defeat.

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Everyone knows that swan song is a figurative term meaning “a farewell appearance or a final act or pronouncement (especially the last work of an author or composer).” But we’d bet not many folks know that the swan song fable –and it is a fable — has been around for such a long, long time.

Plato gave swans the gift of prophecy, observing that “when they perceive that they must die, having sung all their life long, do then sing more lustily than ever.”

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Word lovers delight in the delicious wordplay of parkway and driveway. They gleefully note that we drive on the parkway and park on the driveway. But once you know the stories behind the words, the two terms don’t seem so odd. The early driveway named a road or way along which animals, such as stock or game, were driven. The park in parkway comes from the landscaping (or sometimes the public park) that gives the thoroughfare its touch of green.

English is filled with words that people confuse in unexpected ways — sometimes ways that even seem downright silly. Need an example? Consider the words nyctalopia and hemeralopia.

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Folks in the community of Viola, Minnesota mark the 125th anniversary of the original Viola Gopher Count on June 17th, 1999. It was on that date in 1874 that Violans first took to their fields and tried to capture every one of those pesky rodents whose burrowing and munching was damaging the crops. The 1999 Viola Gopher Count takes the form of a community festival. Our take on the action involves burrowing into our books and digging up some dirt about the pugnacious critters.

For starters, no one knows exactly how the thickset rodents, native to North and Central America, came by their name. According to one theory, gopher is a shortening of me gopher. According to another theory, the word comes from gaufre (”honeycomb” in French), because the gopher’s subterranean tunnels resemble a honeycomb.

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On the Friday before Father’s Day, we look at matters paternal.

The adjective paternal was born of pater (Latin for “father”) in the 15th century. The English Pater itself dates back to the 14th century, when it was borrowed into our language as a shortening of the Latin paternoster (literally, “Our Father”). Pater can still refer to the Lord’s Prayer, but when you hear British speakers pronounce the word \pay-ter\, they are using it in the generic sense “father.”

If you guessed that the English father is distantly related to the Latin pater, pat yourself on the back. Other linguistic relatives of that ancient word (father is as old as our language itself) include pater and pitri, the Greek and Sanskrit terms for “father.”

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