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podictionary Podcasts

PodcastDirectory / Variety / Variety
PodcastDirectory / Regions / NA / Canada

An almost daily podcast for logophiles (lovers of words), podictionary covers a new word for a minute or two in each episode, discussing etymology (word history) and related trivia.

Primary Format :
Variety

Also Listed as:
Etymology
Variety
Word of the Day
Words

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Ottawa
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ON
Country :
Canada
Country :
NA
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Words Variety | Etymology Variety |

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connive - podictionary 831

The Latin root meant "to shut the eyes," so the sense is that officialdom conveniently didn't see whatever was being secretly planned.

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complainee - podictionary 830

A complainee stood out in this list because unlike these other –ee words which are all about interactions between two people, a complainer and a complainee are only two of a kind of reverse love triangle; there are three people involved.

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dime - podictionary 829

When dimes were first introduced into North America there was another coin of even lower value and that was called the mill.

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screw - podictionary 827

long before English connected screw to sexuality Latin had already done so

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dodo - podictionary 826

By all accounts these birds tasted really bad with all the tenderness of an old boot.

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tinker - podictionary 825

how evil can it be to repair pots?

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shark - podictionary 824

Before England became a great seafaring nation few Englishmen had ever seen any large oceangoing sharks. Instead they were familiar with smaller species. These they called dogfish and nurse

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carabiner - podictionary 822

I find it a little unsettling though that in French a carabin is slang for a medical student.

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sabotage - podictionary 821

Today’s podictionary word brought to you by GoToMeeting. Try it free for 30 days by following the link www.gotomeeting.com/podcast In November of 2007 the International Herald Tribune, which identifies itself as the global edition of the New York Times, reported that the high speed train lines in France had been sabotaged. A minor point in the article [...]

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curious - podictionary 820

...he cut a wide swath through a Manhattan demimonde whose fierce friendships and bitter feuds—fueled by oceans of booze...

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mother - podictionary 819

The Indo-European root was mater. Not too different for five to seven thousand years.

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mosquito - podictionary 817

In Latin musca meant fly so mosquito literally means "little fly."

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honey - podictionary 816

Etymologists think that perhaps the word root behind honey might originally not have meant this sweet sticky substance, but a yellow honey-like color instead.

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itinerary - podictionary 815

The sense of travel embodied in itinerary shows up also in itinerant. An itinerant salesman is a traveling salesman.

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trampoline - podictionary 814

In Italian trampoli meant "stilts" and although none of the dictionaries go this far, it seems to me logical that the up-in-the-air function of a trampoline might well have adopted the "high walking" name from stilts.

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canvass - podictionary 812

The sense of punishing someone as relates to canvas does not come from the use of canvas as the flooring in a boxing ring since the sense of punishment is 500 years old while the first citation we have for canvas in boxing is from 1910.

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nefarious - podictionary 811

at one stroke Cawdrey labels half the human population as unskillful. That's not why he was nefarious though.

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amen - podictionary 810

At every stage along its path to us its owners knew it was something special and so kept it safe; that literally includes keeping it safe from Viking attack.

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enthusiasm - podictionary 809

Scottish philosopher David Hume said that enthusiasts were "gloomy" and "hare-brained" and only got along with people who were as "delirious and dismal" as they were.

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pundit - podictionary 807

This word exposes for me how opaque our western understanding of other cultures is. You have to be a true pundit to avoid getting into trouble.

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equator - podictionary 806

In fact our term equator is actually a contraction of a whole Latin phrase "circulus aequator diei et noctis" or in modern English "the circle that makes day and night equal."

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Zimbabwe - podictionary 805

I am particularly pleased to bring you the etymology of the word Zimbabwe today.  Paul Quarrington gave me a thrill when I met him at a writer’s conference. He had been on one of the panels and since I’m a fan of his I approached the dais after his presentation to see if I could get [...]

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family - podictionary 804

when the word family finally did make its appearance in English both the words kin and house still held more of what we think of as the meaning of family than did family.

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aftermath - podictionary 802

when aftermath put in its first appearance in writing in 1523 it was a good thing. We have no idea why this word was positive or neutral in its literal sense, but negative as a metaphor.

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beauty - podictionary 801

Just like power tools and heavy equipment beauty is a good thing but one that must be approached with caution.

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persnickety - podictionary 800

this is episode 800 of podictionary

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extravagant - podictionary 799

Shakespeare used the word extravagant in Love's Labour's Lost applying to emotions that went beyond reasonable; and in Hamlet applying to the ghost that was roving out of bounds by coming back from the dead.

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word - podictionary 797

the parts of human experience that are most common to us all are the ones for which the history of a word describing that little bit of our common heritage goes back furthest

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yahoo - podictionary 796

The Oxford English Dictionary tells me that as an exclamation of joy or excitement, yahoo only dates from 1976; whereas as a rude, noisy or violent person the word goes back to 1726. The first yahoos back almost 300 years were the invention of Jonathan Swift in his Gulliver's Travels.

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runcible - podictionary 795

Here’s an example of a word that started out with no meaning but that was so widespread or so delicious that people started giving it a meaning.

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crew - podictionary 794

When you climb aboard an airplane the intercom often squawks a welcome on behalf of the captain and crew. The crew is of course the team of people who try to keep you happy during your time in the aerial-sardine-can while at the same time keeping it aerial. The term crew for this group of people comes [...]

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croissant - podictionary 793

According to John Ayto’s A to Z of Food and Drink: ” These new-moon-shaped puff-pastry rolls seem first to have been introduced to British and American breakfast tables towards the end of the nineteenth century.” He goes on to cast aspersions on the stories told about the invention of these yummy baked goods.  Wikipedia disses the stories [...]

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recruit - podictionary 792

Check out Grammar Girl’s forthcoming book. Here’s a link. Although people are recruited to join corporations or sports teams, the main meaning of recruit seems to have a military connotation to it. This actually lines up well with the first emergence of the word into English about 50 years after Shakespeare. At first recruits were only military and [...]

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immaculate - podictionary 791

The Latin root of immaculate means "not maculate." But what does maculate mean I hear you asking.

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smarmy - podictionary 790

it is a fairly logical progression from something that meant "smear" to describing someone who felt a little slimy, as if they were smeared with oil.

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wreck - podictionary 789

first citation 1077 and attributed to no less than William the Conqueror himself

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amaze - podictionary 787

before Shakespeare amaze meant "to put out of one's wits; to stun or stupefy, as by a blow on the head."

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paparazzi - podictionary 786

The paparazzo who was the subject of the first English citation supposedly practiced for quick photo-ops by having a friend toss a coin in the air so he could "shoot" it dead centre in his frame; along the lines of a western gunslinger.

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accost - podictionary 785

how Edmond Spenser accosted Geoffrey Chaucer

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evict - podictionary 784

The American Heritage Dictionary points back to an Indo-European root weik meaning "to fight" or "to conquer." The leading "e" in evict is an intensifier according to the Oxford English Dictionary, as if to conquer someone wasn't enough. By the time evict made it into English it was a legal term meaning to recover property, and sometimes recover that property by kicking the occupants off the property.

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nubile - podictionary 782

At first in English a person was nubile with respect to their age; they were old enough to marry. The change in meaning from "marriageable" to "sexy" must have come during the decades when there was no sex without marriage—or at least no public acknowledgement of sex without marriage.

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awkward - podictionary 781

awkward can be broken into two parts; awk and ward. The ward part is the same as in toward, forward and backward. It indicates a direction. The Oxford English Dictionary actually says in its etymology "in an awk direction." So it turns out that there is actually a word awk; or was.

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campaign - podictionary 780

Political campaigns are conducted like military operations. That's fitting because in 1656 Thomas Blount in his Glossographia wrote of the word campaign: "A word much used among Souldiers, by whom the next Campaine is usually taken for the next Summers Expedition of an Army, or its taking the field."

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changes at podictionary

This is about where I'm headed with podictionary. I think I'd like to make some changes. First let me say that I am not going to stop producing podictionary; not for some time yet anyway.

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bail - podictionary 779

Would no one stand bail for her? Out of one of the upper balconies of the theatre leaps a sailor who swings down to the stage as he might descending rigging from his ship and offers to protect the actress while threatening the other poor actor.

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cab - podictionary 777

Back in Italian and into Latin the root meant "a goat jumping." In fact the American Heritage Dictionary tells me that caper meant "he-goat" back in Latin.

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taxi - podictionary 776

Those earliest German taxameters didn't actually compute the price of your ride, they simply connected to the wheels of the carriage so that they could show you how far you'd gone. So today we'd call them odometers. Strange that, because the word odometer had been floating around for more than a hundred years before people adopted this German trade name instead.

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stall - podictionary 775

The etymological sources give a bewildering spider-web of related words but seem to connect this kind of stalling of a car to the stall a horse might stand in. It's the standing still that counts.

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curl - podictionary 774

There was a little girl / Who had a little curl / Right in the middle of her forehead; / And when she was good / She was very, very good, / But when she was bad she was horrid.

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size - podictionary 772

When size first appears in English back before the year 1300 it did not mean "dimension" or "magnitude."

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assess - podictionary 773

The 1935 citation in the Oxford English Dictionary that liberates assessment for uses beyond taxation is credited to Webster. Since by 1935 Noah Webster had been dead lo those 90 years we will turn our gaze instead to the New International Dictionary, Second Edition that was printed in his name in that year.

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nutrition - podictionary 771

If you've ever been or been close to a new mother when she hears babies crying you'll believe it when I make the connection between flow and nutrition. Just the sound of babies crying is usually enough to get a nursing mother's milk flowing.

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matrix - podictionary 770

it came as a mild surprise to me as I was writing my book on body words that the part of your fingernail called the matrix was so called because this was a Latin word for "womb"

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envelope - podictionary 769

this is one of those words that came into English twice from French, each time with a slightly different meaning.

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squirrel - podictionary 768

they all have one thing in common, a big bushy tail. In fact the entire species in named for it's tail.

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develop - podictionary 767

Real estate development certainly doesn't reveal roads, houses and shopping malls that had previously been hidden in farmer's fields and woodlots.

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cricket - podictionary 766

"That's disgusting. I mean, sushi is bad enough"

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humble - podictionary 765

In expressing that feeling of it being "pretty nice right here" I am actually not thinking of home as humble. The Oxford English Dictionary's first citation for humble is extracted from a sermon dated to the year 1250 and carries a definitions of: Having a low estimate of one's importance, worthiness, or merits.

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chain - podictionary 764

Two chemists were trying to figure out why a chemical reaction was behaving in a certain way when one pulled out his pocket watch and undid the chain that secured it to his vest. He wiggled it theorizing on the analogy to the chemical reaction and invented the phrase "chain reaction."

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dilettante - podictionary 762

This seems to be a word that—like amateur—started out as a good thing but has come down to us as a bit of a not-so-good thing.

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cuisine - podictionary 761

The French might be seen as great cooks these days but the etymology of the word cuisine reveals the dirty little secret that they learned it from someone else.

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deliver - podictionary 760

it seems that somewhere back in the mists of time people started thinking that setting something free with the word liber wasn't highfalutin enough and felt the need to add a de to it without actually changing the meaning

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freebooter - podictionary 759

The Dutch parent word is from a Germanic source and so maps pretty nicely to the English components free and boot that came to us from Old English and its Germanic roots. In this case boot doesn't mean the thing you pull onto your foot.

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filibuster - podictionary 757

The Dutch term for a pirate was vrijbuiter and this appears to have quite quickly have been mutated in English mouths into filibuster.

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cappuccino - podictionary 756

how did a group of monks give their name to a fancy coffee drink?

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scandal - podictionary 755

this was the second coming for the word into English because we see citations for it hundreds of years before, but that first time it mutated into another English word slander and so scandal had to be rediscovered

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dwarf - podictionary 754

in some ways in an ancient world view, dwarves were seen on a par with the gods

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tea - podictionary 752

both coffee and tea show up in the written record in the same year—1598—and in the same document, but tea came out as chaa and didn't turn up again as tea until 1655

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porcupine - podictionary 751

Shortly after the word porcupine waddled its way into English the French king Louis XII came to the throne. He brought with him the fearsome symbol of his family crest, the terror-inspiring porcupine.

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turmoil - podictionary 750

The theory is that "turmoil" arose from Old French and meant a container that was part of a mill. The container was always in motion to shake the grain into the grindstone of the mill.

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club - podictionary 749

Groucho Marx was accepted as a member of a very exclusive club called the Friar's Club and then sent them a telegram saying "Please accept my resignation. I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member."

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OUPblog feed now in iTunes directory

This is just a quick non-episode of podictionary to let subscribers know that the Oxford University Press blog feed for my Thursday episodes can now be found in the iTunes podcast directory. If you use iTunes you can subscribe to the OUPblog feed most easily by clicking here or on the iTunes image. You can also go [...]

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Webster2 - podictionary 747

You might wonder how he gets away with it. For instance if I wanted to call my book The Oxford Dictionary of Body Parts I might just hear from an attorney

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Webster1 - podictionary 746

Last summer I had the pleasure of meeting Johnny Carrera. Johnny Carrera is a dictionary artist. I bet you never even knew such a thing existed.

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sparkle - podictionary 745

Sparkle goes back to spark which the written record shows us as an Old English word used at least as early as the year 725. Before that the earlier path of this word remains dark and neither the OED nor others can tell us much about where it came from since it doesn't show up in many other languages. Our sense of sparkle as a more twinkling or brilliant point of light doesn't begin to show up until about 100 years after Wycliffe's death. Then 100 years later, around Shakespeare's time—ab ...

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outrage - podictionary 744

In the play Hamlet the suicidal lead character's famous line talks about the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Hamlet is not talking about fortune taking out its rage on him. For Hamlet the slings and arrows just weren't being fair. The troubles he was having to suffer were just right over the top.

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podictionary still elsewhere Thursdays

This is another non-episode of podictionary. Sometimes when you are looking for a web page instead of the information you want, your browser serves up “404 - not found.” Voicemail audio clip: Charles, this is Bruce Mar. It was not lost on me, the irony that as I was listening to my podcast this morning on [...]

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butler - podictionary 742

Butler comes from French and means "bottle bearer."

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valet - podictionary 741

The Oxford English Dictionary tells me that the word first appeared in English in 1567 and came from French. It links the word to two other words: vassal and varlet. Evidently in Old French the meaning of all three words evolved out of that for a manservant.

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hunch - podictionary 740

The earliest meanings had a sense of "push" to them. A hunch-back may be thought of as a back that is pushed up out of shape. When you hunch your shoulders you push them up By the mid 1800s a hunch could be a "tip" or a hint" that someone gave you, sort of pushing you toward the right answer.

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hunch - podictionary 740

The earliest meanings had a sense of "push" to them. A hunch-back may be thought of as a back that is pushed up out of shape. When you hunch your shoulders you push them up By the mid 1800s a hunch could be a "tip" or a hint" that someone gave you, sort of pushing you toward the right answer.

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ode - podictionary 739

The guy who first did set ode to paper was a dictionary maker named Thomas Elyot. As I reported earlier Thomas Elyot was fortunate enough to have King Henry VIII take an interest in his dictionary project. That was after another little task King Henry had assigned to Elyot.

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podictionary elsewhere Thursdays

There’s no podictionary episode here today. That’s for the very GOOD reason that starting today Thursday episodes of podictionary will be carried on the Oxford University Press blog. This means that if you want to hear Thursday episodes of podictionary you’ll need to subscribe to the appropriate OUP blog feed. The podictionary’s OUPblog feed address is http://blog.oup.com/category/reference/podictionary/feed/ The OUPblog can [...]

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jiggery-pokery - podictionary 737

The place where jiggery-pokery first surfaced in 1893 was in A glossary of words used in the county of Wiltshire. I was able to lay electronic hands on this old glossary and it tells us a few things.

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loyal - podictionary 736

You know of course that Henry VIII went though wives like most people go through cars; exciting at first, but after a few years you start thinking of a newer model. I suppose loyalty was most important to Henry when someone was being loyal to him, not necessarily when he was being disloyal to others.

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vellum - podictionary 735

Paper that is 600 or 1200 years old is usually not paper anymore but dust. Instead of using paper the scribes of the day used parchment and vellum. These materials protected old documents so well because they had earlier been designed to protect animals—as their skin.

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vomit - podictionary 734

Some years ago I went to see a play. As we sat reading the program before the lights dimmed I was interested to see a note apologizing to patrons for any inconvenience during the construction of the theatre's new vomitorium. I've stopped going to that theater.

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nephew - podictionary 733

According to the American Heritage Dictionary there was an Indo-European root nepot that didn't mean the son of your sibling necessarily, but could also mean "grandson."

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caucus - podictionary 732

John Adams says that the Caucus Club drank phlip (a mix of beer and whiskey). American Heritage dictionary says that the club's name comes from a Latin word caucus meaning a "drinking vessel." Not everyone agrees.

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affidavit - podictionary 731

it came from Latin and the lawyers of the time were using it because the literal English translation of the Latin affidavit was "has stated on oath." It's the fid in the middle of affidavit that gives us the oath, or at least a pledge of faith. It's the same fid from fidelity.

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stickler - podictionary 730

The first citation we have for stickler is from another dictionary maker, Thomas Elyot. He lived during the time of Henry VIII and was on good terms with the king. It seems that Henry VIII even took an interest in Thomas Elyot's dictionary.

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etiquette - podictionary 729

Emily Post clearly felt that if you knew your etiquette you could write your own ticket in life, and etymologically she's right.

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task - podictionary 728

600 years ago, the thinking is that the earliest meaning of the word task in English was in fact "tax."

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tax - podictionary 727

If you feel that the government is putting the touch on you when they gather their taxes this is an etymologically accurate feeling.

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federal - podictionary 726

The fact that the OED chooses Thomas Jefferson and George Washington as its first two citations for this usage tells me that the OED in this case didn't really search too hard to make sure they had the earliest citation. It just feels like these two are too much the obvious candidates to cite.

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interrogate - podictionary 725

It's the rogare part that is more fun I think. In Latin it means "to ask" but the word root goes back to Indo-European and there reg- meant "to move in a straight line." Evidently the connection here is that when you ask someone a question you often hold your hand out toward them. It's thought that this holding the hand out straight brought the meaning of "straight" into the word that Latin speakers used for "ask."

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foible - podictionary 724

The Latin root has an unexpected meaning though; flebilis was a Latin word meaning "something to be wept over" from flere "to weep."

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parsimonious - podictionary 723

Beyond meaning "cheap" and the Latin root meaning "to save" there are other Latin meanings - extends to saving your food - parsimonious and pastrami are cousins.

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nepotism - podictionary 722

An Italian guy named Gregorio Leti was so mad at the church that he published a book called Il Nipotismo di Roma. Since books that call down the powers that be and point out all their flaws are always popular, this one was translating in a flash into as many languages as there were possible to have people snickering in their armchairs by the fire.

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Dutch - podictionary 721

When the word Dutch first shows up in English in 1380 it didn't actually restrict itself to this geographic location. If you have ever heard a German refer to their own country in their own language you may have been struck that it sounds kind of like the word Dutch; Deutschland.

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courage - podictionary 720

At first in English the word courage had meanings extending to all sorts of feelings one might attribute to one's heart: thoughts, feelings desires and passions; gentle, sexual, and violent. It was in the 1300s that courage began to make it into print as an English word and it did so with those many different senses of emotion. Over the centuries all those other meanings fell away.

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wheelbarrow - podictionary 719

There is actually an Oxford English Dictionary entry under "drunk" for various proverbial phrases including from 1709 "drunk as a wheelbarrow." Think of yourself with a heavily loaded wheelbarrow weaving back and forth trying to keep it from dumping. Doesn't that remind you of an inebriated walk?

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boutique - podictionary 718

boutique didn't show up in English so much from France or from French aristocracy in England, as from India

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supercalifragilisticexpialidocious - podictionary 717

It has to be a real word; for a while there it was worth 12 million dollars.

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disgruntled - podictionary 716

from this human issuance of complaint being called a gruntle came the word disgruntled; having fired off the complaint you were in a grumpy mood

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dandelion - podictionary 715

there was a superstition that picking dandelions would make you wet your bed. For this reason another name for the plant was pissabed.

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recipe - podictionary 714

In Latin the parent word was recipere and meant "to take." About the time of William Shakespeare's birth just over 400 years ago physicians would give written instructions on what to take to make a sick person better and would head the list with this Latin word. You still see a vestige of this at the pharmacy when you notice the pharmaceutical symbol Rx. That's what that mysterious little Rx symbol actually means; it stands for the Latin parent of recipe and it literally means "to take" b ...

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capsize - podictionary 713

No one really knows why tipping a boat over is called capsizing but the OED and others do give one theory. The theory is that capsize means to "sink by the head" or top of the ship since cabo means "head" in several languages. So if a ship turns over it often sinks; and in this case it sinks head first.

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prescription - podictionary 712

Grammarians start from a point of view that there is a right way and a wrong way to express yourself—that's prescriptive. Lexicographers on the other hand are only reporting on words as they see them being used; no value judgments—that's descriptive. So why don't grammarians and lexicographers get into fistfights in libraries and bookstores all over the world?

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pound - podictionary 711

It's the word octothorp that merits a little more time. Even though Americans had been calling this thing the pound sign or the number sign for 50 years Bell Labs was having none of it. So in 1974 the magazine Telephony announced that this symbol "at long last had a name: octothorp."

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control - podictionary 710

back in Latin the word contrarotulare came about as a blend of two earlier Latin words contra meaning "against" and rotulus meaning "roll." While the literal meaning of this Latin word is "against the roll" the figurative meaning is "duplicate register" because the way that people have always managed and controlled is by keeping lists and checking against those lists.

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lurid - podictionary 709

In his rage he wrote: "Must this then be suffered? He even published a rebuttal dictionary to The New World of Words called A World of Errors Discovered in The New World of Words.

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syllabus - podictionary 708

The problem was that Cicero wasn't writing about a list, he was writing about the little tags on the scrolls and the classics scholars jumped to conclusions. So everybody makes mistakes; who really cares. And that's the second point; who cares?

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desiderata - podictionary 707

Even though Les Crane was a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars and had a right to be here he didn't have a right to infringe on the Desiderata copyright and so got sued for it.

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