Master for Webs

On this first official day of summer, we look at what the Bard termed eternal summer and the Beach Boys popularized as endless summer. Let’s put the appeal of surfing aside and look at some words from the Bard and other writers who have written about those warm, hazy days ahead.

In the same sonnet in which William Shakespeare declared that his love’s “eternal summer shall not fade,” he also described her as “more lovely and more temperate [than a] summer’s day.”

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Today we celebrate the life of English navigator George Vancouver, born on June 22, 1757.

After joining the Royal Navy at age 13, Vancouver eventually went on to survey the Pacific coast of North America, considered to be one of the most difficult surveys ever undertaken. He also verified that no continuous channel exists between the Pacific Ocean and northeast Canada’s Hudson Bay. Read the rest of this entry »

We heard from a listener who wondered how the phrase bell, book, and candle came to be a formula for cursing. The term isn’t all that common nowadays, but literary types may still recognize it.

Sir Thomas Malory used the phrase as an angry vow in his Morte d’Arthur, when he wrote “I shall curse you with book and bell and candle.” William Shakespeare borrowed the phrase in King John when a young man pledged “Bell, book and candle shall not drive me back.”

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As this year’s annual American Library Association convention gets underway in New Orleans, we thought it an appropriate time to re-open the books (quietly, of course) on how the library came by its name.

Library derives from liber, a Latin noun originally denoting the inner bark of a tree that was used as paper before the introduction of papyrus. Technology advanced and papyrus paper displaced the bark, but the word liber was retained to refer to “a sheet of papyrus used for writing.” It eventually acquired two additional senses: “a book, volume, or long document” and “a division of a long literary work.”

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June is National Rose Month and before the month goes to seed, let’s put on those rose-colored glasses and investigate the various roses in our lexical garden.

Botanists count more than one hundred species and thirteen thousand varieties of the beautiful and fragrant rose. Shakespeare asserted that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but we’d bet that, given a choice, most people would choose a brier rose over dog rose, (at least until they found out that those are two different names for the same European wild rose). Read the rest of this entry »

June is National Rose Month and before the month goes to seed, let’s put on those rose-colored glasses and investigate the various roses in our lexical garden.

Botanists count more than one hundred species and thirteen thousand varieties of the beautiful and fragrant rose. Shakespeare asserted that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but we’d bet that, given a choice, most people would choose a brier rose over dog rose, (at least until they found out that those are two different names for the same European wild rose).

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William James Mayo, the older of the two brothers who established the Minnesota medical facility that would come to be called the Mayo Clinic, was born on June 29 in 1861. Doctor Mayo inspired us to spread the word about a term that just happens to be spelled the same way as his last name. We’re talking about mayo, a shortened form of the word mayonnaise.

If you guessed that mayonnaise has a French background, you can count yourself in the know about the linguistics of that dressing made of egg yolks, vegetable oil, and vinegar or lemon juice. Etymologists aren’t certain about the term’s origin (they suspect it may have roots in Mahon, a city on the Spanish island of Minorca), but they do know it first appeared in print in English in 1841.

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Sixteen years ago on June 30 some twins in New York City established a nonprofit organization dedicated to serving twins, their families, medical and social science, and the public. Today we celebrate The Twins Foundation with a singular look at twins in our language.

The Old English word twin meant “twofold,” “double,” or “two by two.” As you might expect, the modern word twin also has multiple meanings. As a noun, it can name either of two offspring produced in the same birth (as in, Rita is Rosie’s twin), or it can identify two individuals who just happen to resemble each other (as in, Everyone supposedly has a twin somewhere in the world). Read the rest of this entry »

The end of the 19th century brought G. & C. Merriam Company copyright and trademark difficulties created by the expiration of early copyrights on Webster’s work, the sale of rights to some of his abridged dictionaries, and the expiration in 1889 of the copyright on Merriam-Webster’s 1847 edition. The respect that Merriam-Webster had earned for its Webster’s dictionaries over the course of fifty years was a desirable asset that unscrupulous companies found they could exploit simply by calling any dictionary they produced or reprinted Webster’s. Read the rest of this entry »