I had always assumed that the horse chestnut had something to do with the horseradish, and I’m therefore deeply saddened to discover that I was, essentially, wrong. I had nurtured a lovely mental image of a proud horse tending his vegetable patch—perhaps humming gently as he weeded his radishes and …
It’s a pleasing little reversal of expectations that sodium is actually derived from soda—not the other way round. Soda was already doing the rounds in the fifteenth century as the name for a mysterious alkaline substance, well before sodium was isolated and given its modern name in 1807. The word …
Brown sauce…. It is hardly the most evocative of names, is it? And yet, it is an indelible part of the British psyche. Supermarkets up and down the land have shelves groaning with the stuff, and every self-respecting roadside caff or pub offers its illegitimate offspring in those impossible-to-open little …
Spot the connection between these two: I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter. – Eliot’s Waste Land POPE’S BROTHER: I HIT CHOIRBOYS – Today’s Times You can’t work out the tense in either. The “read” in Eliot and the “hit” in The Times could both …
Listening to a snatch of the cricket commentary the other day, I was informed that the contest in Adelaide was gruelling. I confess that from our cold but snug cottage I couldn’t quite see how sunny Australia managed to gruel, but gruel it did. Gruel is one of those odd …
If you are squiriferous you are like a squire, which is to say that you are gentlemanly. It’s a fun word, if only because it is redolent of squirrels. Also the squ sound is irresistible to any thoughtful speaker of English. Incidentally, if you are both a squire and a …
I know it is a bit late, but let us talk about Hogmanay Hogmanay, the Scots New Year, is one of those words that sounds irretrievably non-Latinate, unless you remove the hogm, in which case it sounds exactly like the French word année, or year. Hogmanay is a mysterious word …
Expression in art is a multifaceted concept that can be understood in several ways, depending on the perspective one takes. At its core, it revolves around the idea that art conveys something—whether that is emotion, thought, or meaning—from the creator to the observer. However, what this “something” is and how …
Start with something simple. We’ve got the verb give, which we all know, and the thing that you give is a gift. They’re quite obviously related. This is Not Interesting. Then you’ve got people who use the word gift as a verb, as in “I gifted it to him.” That’s …
Back in the dear old Dark Ages, when all was umbrous, the French borrowed words from the Germans. Some of these words began with a W, which the French, being French, found hard to pronounce and changed to a G. But not all the French did this. The northern Frenchmen …
