We've all seen store fronts with signs proclaiming them as "Ye Olde [fill in the blank] Shoppe. It's an effort to look quaint, old fashioned, and charming. It is not, however, at all historically accurate. In fact, if we think about it, it doesn't really make sense. "Ye" is actually the older form of "you," not "the." Here's what happened. Way back when, the word the was written using a character called a thorn and derived from Old English runes. The thorn character (þ) represents a th- sound, as in the in Old and Middle English, and was written thus: þe.

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What a marvelous post, but . . . no. A thousand times no, on freely creating new words.

I am not a lexicographer by training, though I've worked on a variety of dictionaries, primarily of slang. Nor am I a linguist; I am at heart a philologist, with particular expertise in dead Indo-European languages. Moreover, like most philologists, I loathe Webster's; it's a hack dictionary. I turn, instead, to the American Heritage Dictionary, which has not only lexiographers, but linguists, philologists, and, best of all, a panel of usage experts from a range of fields and backgrounds who offer knowledgeable opionions about the actual real-world use of words and phrases. Plus, the AHD is the only dictionary with Calvert Watkins Dictionary of Indo-European Roots as an appendix. Who wouldn't want that?

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In recent months I've noticed an increase in people who want to offer critical, opinionated reviews of books they haven't read, more often than not, in an effort to prevent anyone else reading the book. This is, on the face of it, such an odd idea that many people are surprised it happens.

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As a linguist, it was very intriguing and heart warming to hear a lexicographer talk about words in such a caring manner. Taking on the sentiment that no word should be left behind. All words should be included. Which begs the question: what is a word. Well the best place to consult would be the dictionary: “something that is said”. Is one definition. Well I am sure that there is more to it than that. But irregardless…

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The current core definition for Spinster is according to the AHD:

1. A woman who has remained single beyond the conventional age for marrying.
2. A single woman.

Spinster has been equated with "unmarried," in modern English. But historically, the third definition was the only meaning: " 3. A person whose occupation is spinning."

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There are a number of homophonic words in English, some of which cause no end of confusion. One of those is the word slew, or slough, or even, slue. All of which are pronounced "slew." We have, in other words:

The word slew, the past tense of the verb slay; there's the slew that's a variant spelling of slough:

1. A depression or hollow, usually filled with deep mud or mire.
2. also slue A stagnant swamp, marsh, bog, or pond, especially as part of a bayou, inlet, or backwater.
3. A state of deep despair or moral degradation.

And we have the slew I want to talk about today:

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Sheep with bell

When idioms are built on metaphors of daily life, and those metaphors die because we no longer live as we once did, those idioms stop being understood. I've noticed of late in both online and printed publications, references to someone being "died in the wool." What they meant, of course, was the other "dye," the one related coloring cloth. Dyed in the wool means "Thoroughgoing; out-and-out: a dyed-in-the-wool populist." Dyed in the wool is almost always used in terms of politics; Kennedy was a dyed in the wool Democrat. But it can be used for other fields as well; I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Macintosh fan. The idiom is derived from the practice of dying wool that is clean, and has been combed or "carded," to remove tangles and bits of trash, but not yet spun into yarn. Wool dyed in this way tends to be more thoroughly, permanently colored.

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Tawdry is one of those words that are fairly familiar but which have odd, even delightful stories in their etymologies. Tawdry is a synonym for gaudy, though the connotations of tawdry are slightly more negative than those of gaudy. The formal definition of tawdry is

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Easter is

A Christian feast commemorating the Resurrection of Jesus.

2. The day on which this feast is observed, the first Sunday following the full moon that occurs on or next after the vernal equinox.

3. Eastertide.

That seems straightforward enough, aside from the difficulties of calendrical calculations. Those were so obscure that a special church conference was convened to determine which calculating system would be used to determine the date of Easter. Once that was settled, sort of (you will note that Eastern Orthodox dates are different), the feast itself is not controversial.

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When I was a kid, and the family church celebrated Maundy Thursday, I thought they were saying "Monday Thursday," which I thought was very odd. I suspect I'm not alone in that. Maundy Thursday is actually "The Thursday before Easter, observed in commemoration of the Last Supper of Jesus. Also called Holy Thursday." "Maundy," or in Middle English "maunde" refers to the ritual of washing the feet of the poor, a rather common event on this day even now in many churches. Middle English maunde derives from Old French mande, from Latin mandatum novum , or "new commandment," a reference to Jesus' words to the Apostles after he washed their feet, as described in John 13:34.

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