If you’ve tuned into entertainment news lately, a curious word may have caught your ear: mumblecore. It’s surfaced recently surrounding the release of Drinking Buddies, a romantic comedy starring Olivia Wilde and Jake Johnson. The term was rumored to have been coined in jest by a sound editor in 2005, but the construct has demonstrated considerable lasting power, canonized in New York Times articles such as “A Generation Finds Its Mumble” from 2007 and more recently in reference to Drinking Buddies, “Mumblecore Masters, Enunciating Clearly.” Today, we’re going to explore the components and evolution of this buzzword. CONTINUE READING »
With all the recent hullabaloo about the figurative sense of literally, language enthusiasts have given much thought to this often maligned term. Recently we discussed how the metaphorical extension of literally is nothing new—it’s been around since the 1700s—and now we’d like to explore a few other adverbs and their ironic uses. Let’s focus on definitely and totally to see if the linguistic development of literally is not an isolated incident but a trend. CONTINUE READING »
Can you turn to the person next to you, look them in the eye, and honestly say that you have never felt a twinge of concern in the morning when you realize it is Friday the 13th? It’s time for triskaidekaphobes to acknowledge their shared superstition, learn its possible source, and try to gain some insight into what it means for millions of people to hold such a belief.
Let’s start with Friday, named for one of two Norse goddesses, Freya or CONTINUE READING »
Frugal is a great word for thrifty people because it glorifies the idea of saving without any of the negative connotations of cheap or miserly. English speakers started using frugal at the turn of the 17th century. While the noun form had already existed in English since the 1530s, the earliest citing of the adjective form is not until Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor about 70 years later. CONTINUE READING »
We take the predictability of the calendar for granted. But we may have felt differently if we were living under the rule of Julius Caesar.
September was the seventh month of the old Roman calendar. In this calendar, the year began in March. But the Julian calendar reform shifted the start of new year back CONTINUE READING »
The exact origin of motley is uncertain, but it’s likely to have come from the Middle English word mote, meaning “speck.” It makes sense then that mottled and speckled have similar meanings. Mottle is actually a back formation of motley. CONTINUE READING »
Recently the wordsmiths of the United States have availed themselves once again to descry the figurative use of the word literally. This particular spate of analysis finds its origins in a Reddit post titled, “We did it guys, we finally killed English,” which featured an image of Google’s definition for the word. Since that popular post, journalists and language experts have added their voices to the loudening din. CONTINUE READING »
This may come as a surprise, but the link between sustainability and environmentalism is actually fairly recent. CONTINUE READING »
Welcome to Part II of our discussion on the word so. Last week we explored the sentence-initial so, and today we’ll be looking at ending sentences with so—a phenomenon called “the dangling so.” Despite its widespread usage, this construction seems to irk people even more than the sentence-initial so; there’s even a Facebook group called “I Hate People Who End Sentences with ‘so…’”
Though the phrase soul mate gained steam toward the end of the twentieth century, the idea goes all the way back to Plato’s Symposium, written in 385–380 BCE. In Symposium, when the two dialogists discuss love, Aristophanes tells Socrates that human beings used to have four arms, four legs, and two faces, and they were happy and complete. CONTINUE READING »
