podictionary Podcasts

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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 City : Ottawa State/Province : ON Country : Canada Country : NA User Tags: User Votes: RSS Feed Website People found this Podcast Searching for: Words Variety | Etymology Variety | View this Podcast on a Google Map. Add to iTunes Text Only listing of podictionary Podcasts Trumix.com listings available of podictionary Podcasts Click Here to Update the directory of this podcasts programs.

Trumix.com listings available of podictionary Podcasts Build your own playlists with this podcast. 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website screw - podictionary 827 long before English connected screw to sexuality Latin had already done so Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website dodo - podictionary 826 By all accounts these birds tasted really bad with all the tenderness of an old boot. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website tinker - podictionary 825 how evil can it be to repair pots? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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 Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website carabiner - podictionary 822 I find it a little unsettling though that in French a carabin is slang for a medical student. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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 [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website curious - podictionary 820 ...he cut a wide swath through a Manhattan demimonde whose fierce friendships and bitter feuds—fueled by oceans of booze... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website mother - podictionary 819 The Indo-European root was mater. Not too different for five to seven thousand years. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website mosquito - podictionary 817 In Latin musca meant fly so mosquito literally means "little fly." Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website itinerary - podictionary 815 The sense of travel embodied in itinerary shows up also in itinerant. An itinerant salesman is a traveling salesman. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website nefarious - podictionary 811 at one stroke Cawdrey labels half the human population as unskillful. That's not why he was nefarious though. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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." Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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 [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website beauty - podictionary 801 Just like power tools and heavy equipment beauty is a good thing but one that must be approached with caution. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website persnickety - podictionary 800 this is episode 800 of podictionary Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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 Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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 [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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 [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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 [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website immaculate - podictionary 791 The Latin root of immaculate means "not maculate." But what does maculate mean I hear you asking. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website wreck - podictionary 789 first citation 1077 and attributed to no less than William the Conqueror himself Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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." Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website accost - podictionary 785 how Edmond Spenser accosted Geoffrey Chaucer Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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." Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website size - podictionary 772 When size first appears in English back before the year 1300 it did not mean "dimension" or "magnitude." Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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" Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website envelope - podictionary 769 this is one of those words that came into English twice from French, each time with a slightly different meaning. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website cricket - podictionary 766 "That's disgusting. I mean, sushi is bad enough" Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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." Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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 Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website cappuccino - podictionary 756 how did a group of monks give their name to a fancy coffee drink? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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 Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website dwarf - podictionary 754 in some ways in an ancient world view, dwarves were seen on a par with the gods Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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 Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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." Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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 [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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 Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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 ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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 [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website butler - podictionary 742 Butler comes from French and means "bottle bearer." Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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 [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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." Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website task - podictionary 728 600 years ago, the thinking is that the earliest meaning of the word task in English was in fact "tax." Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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." Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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." Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website boutique - podictionary 718 boutique didn't show up in English so much from France or from French aristocracy in England, as from India Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website supercalifragilisticexpialidocious - podictionary 717 It has to be a real word; for a while there it was worth 12 million dollars. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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 Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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 ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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." Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website