Apparently not…as you will find out below: 1. Herquebus (c.1566) The noun buss, meaning ‘a kiss, especially a loud or vigorous one – a smacker’, is first found in the mid-16th century, according to the wonderful people responsible for the OED. It may be a variant of the earlier bass …
On March the 21st, 1754, British nobleman and author Horace Walpole coined the word “serendipity” in a letter to his friend Horace Mann. Walpole used it in reference to the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip, in which characters continually make pleasant discoveries by accident. “Serendipity” was one …
I am pleased to announce that I have been taken on by an American literary agent, the charming Priya of the Lotus Lane Agency. This prompted me to dig up from one of my many boxes an American-English dictionary. It is a slim volume, almost bulimic, and it was first …
In the 1850s a Bavarian immigrant called Levi Strauss arrived in San Francisco hoping to sell supplies to the miners. He had with him several rolls of cotton canvas intended for tents. Instead, Strauss identified a ready market for stout canvas trousers and overalls suitable for the rugged conditions in the …
The opening of the first restaurant is credited to a certain Monsieur Boulanger, a Parisian soup-seller, who in 1765 opened an establishment offering customers a selection of wholesome soups and meals. This was something of a novelty. Eighteenth-century diners were not accustomed to being offered a choice when forced to …
The medieval Latin term capitate denoted ‘property, principal stock of wealth’. It was the neuter form of the Latin adjective capitalis (the source of English capital) which meant ‘chief, principal’, being derived from the noun caput,‘head’. Capitate was borrowed into Old French as chatel and from there passed into Old …
Lots of people, especially rich and powerful ones, have cities, buildings, even stars named in their honor, but how many are forever known by the name of a verse form? Let’s see, there’s the Petrarchan sonnet, the Shakespearean sonnet, the Spenserian stanza—and the clerihew. E. C. Bentley, who died in …
The word pun is believed, at least by some etymologists, to be a contraction of the English word pundigrion or, possibly, punnet—both of which are thankfully now archaic, but in their prime were used to mean a “quibble,” a “cavil,” or a “small or fine point of argument.” Both words …
Fur, such as beaver, ermine or miniver, was sometimes used to line the cloaks and surcoats of the wealthy in the thirteenth century, but during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries fur was much in evidence both as a rich trimming on the edges or panels of a garment and as …
Why does the G in Margaret sound different from the G in margarine? Why does C begin both case and cease? And why is it funny when a philologist faints, but not phunny to laf about it? English spelling is notoriously clumsy, with its surfeit of silent letters, fickle i’s …
