11 Classy Insults With Classical Greek and Latin Roots
Make use of these fancy insults with classical Greek and Latin roots to really class up the joint while you twist the dagger.
Make use of these fancy insults with classical Greek and Latin roots to really class up the joint while you twist the dagger.
In 2014, a leaked copy of the Directorate of Intelligence Style Manual & Writer's Guide for Intelligence Publication, a.k.a. Strunk & White for spies, found its way to the Internet.
You'll be looking for a way to work these adorable old-timey slang terms for sex into conversation—trust us.
We need to borrow these.
Thirteen of these etymological tall-tales, taken from word origins guide 'Haggard Hawks and Paltry Poltroons,' are explained and debunked here.
Even logophiles can improve their vocabularies by following these Twitter accounts.
A little fiscal etymology.
Can you spell “Regret”?
Circle, square, triangle—boring! There are so many more shapes than those in nature. Good thing there’s a rich vocabulary of fancy scientific words for shapes. Most of them don’t get much use, which is a shame. Get to know a few of these, and describe you
Terrible and terrific are both formed off the same root: terror. Both started out a few hundred years ago with the meaning of terror-inducing. But terrific took a strange turn at the beginning of the 20th century and ended up meaning really great, not ter
A few years ago, Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson pointed out that the best way to expose a German spy would be to ask them to say the word “squirrel,” because “no German, no matter how well they speak English, can say ‘squirrel.’” So naturally, someone test
We've lost many delightful words and phrases along the way.
English spelling is a crazy mess, but it’s a mess that makes sense if you look at how it got that way.
A semordnilap (itself a semordnilap of “palindromes”) makes a completely different word when spelled backwards.
Criminals have been referring to police as pigs since at least 1811—but they've also called cops and private detectives by many other, more creative names.
These –ty coinages have a slangy, modern ring to them, but English speakers have actually been trying to make –ty happen for centuries.
Now the names for these creatures big and small make total sense.
The Oxford English Dictionary is honoring the centenary with an appeal to the public for help in finding the earliest documented uses of words that first came into English during World War I.
It's very cold, and we're running out of ways to say that. So we reached out to the editors of the Dictionary of American Regional English for suggestions.
We all come into contact with many of these shapes every day. Here's what you can call them.
From reality TV shows to The Beach Boys’ croons of Aruba and Jamaica, references to honeymoons are everywhere. But where did the term "honeymoon" first come from?
You won't find crikey in this book, but there are plenty other weird and wonderful terms work incorporating into everyday conversation.