Dear Dr. Goodword, First let me express my gratitude to you for your good humored contributions to my mailbox which invariably brighten the day. The word I wish to suggest to you is "SMUG". It's short, pungent and apt in several situations. Although I have been one of your steady readers f...

Thanks for this very helpful reply. There is some evidence, however, that "crap" is an eponym referring to Thomas Crapper, who headed a plumbing firm in England and whose name was printed on flush toilets before the first world war. The story goes that American soldiers in England at that ...

A character Viet Thanh Nguyen's novel THE SYMPATHIZER is called "the Crapulent Major". The dictionaries I've consulted trace this rather ugly word to a Latin word for drunkenness. What is its lineage beyond this? How is it distinguishable from the Latin word linked to inebriation??

Regarding whether or not "abate" is transitive, here is a sentence from Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1791): "The moment you abate anything from the full rights of men each to govern himself, and suffer any artificial, positive limitation upon those rights, f...

Can anyone tell me the origin of the word "masher" to refer to a man who pursues women a bit too avidly? Thanks.

I suggest the word "hustings" as the Word Of The Day. It is associated with today's word "psephology", but is possibly heard even less.

Frank Myers
Stony Brook, NY

In Britain, the parliament has stopped meeting until after the upcoming election. The House of Lords still sits, but there is not much agreement about what it can actually do. Members of the House of Lords call this situation being in PURDAH. I wonder if Dr. Goodword could explain this word and its ...

I remember reading an essay by Robert Graves on this topic in which he spoke of the rise of various forms of what he called "camp Latin", as the language of the Roman army and other Roman officials mixed in with the various local languages throughout the Roman Empire. This was probably fac...

I have heard conflicting accounts of the word "theory". One account asserts that the "theo" is related to the Greek word for god, and that theory originally referred to the reports made by an observer of Greek religious rites. Another account that I've heard suggests that the wor...

In the Guardian (London) of June 2, 2007, Martin Amis refers to Prime Minister Tony Blair's "inner circle of brainstormers and media-wise myrmidons." I would like to know all there is to know about this word.