A morpheme is the smallest "meaningful linguistic unit consisting of a word, such as man, or a word element, such as -ed in walked, that cannot be divided into smaller meaningful parts" (American Heritage Dictionary). And yes, there's a pun embedded in the title of this blog. Morpheme Addict is a blog about language, and etymology, and the ways that words carry their history and their stories, with them.

English, more than any other language, is adaptive and acquisitive. We have ransacked the vocabulary of every language we have come into contact with, taking the words and phrases that fulfill unmet gaps in our language, and making them our own. In an era when some foolish souls propose "English only" legislation, we speak a language that has pilfered, filched and outright stolen great swathes of words from, well everyone, and everywhere. As James Nicholl noted twenty years ago:

The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."

James D. Nicoll rec.arts.sf-lovers 1990-05-15

Words are the fossils of language, and the DNA of history.