My mother had in her bedroom what she called a "commode", inherited from her childhood home. It was a small cupboard with a door which took up most of the front and which swung open to one side. She used it as a bedside table and stored magazines in the interior, but she said it got its na...

"It originally referred to a heathen Winter Solstice feast." And still does, among contemporary worshippers of the Norse Gods.

Rabbits are not the only small furry mammal who have been referred to as "bun(ny)". Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, wrote a poem beginning: "The mountain and the squirrel Had a quarrel,/ And the former called the latter 'Little prig.'/ Bun replied..."

"English doesn't like SM or ZM together at the ends of words" - I can think of quite a few: orgasm, chasm, cataclysm, prism, organism, spasm, terrorism, capitalism, socialism, anarchism - in fact lots of ideology isms...

"Darn" is used as a "minced term" for "damn/ed", but I believe its etymology is distinct. An older form of darn, "tarnal" has become archaic, although on rare occasions it is used in the phrase "tarnal nuisance"; this comes from ""The Etern...

"in the 1960s when feminists perceived the generic sense of man as "sexist". " You bet we did. And it still is seen as sexist. It erases women in a way that "human" or "human being" does not. I expect Dr Goodword is a man; men, never having experienced the pro...

This word was already familiar to me, and I would expect it to be so to anyone who has studied American literature, even in in high school. Why no mention of "Thanatopsis" by William Cullen Bryant? I looked up this poem and was struck again by the beauty and comfort of the last section, be...

It wasn't just unpopular people who were treated to a "shivaree". In my grandfather's day it was a common activity to so serenade a newly-wed couple on their wedding night (my grandparents were wed in small town Michigan 1900), much like even today the bridal couple drives away in a car wi...

eon - "1. An indeterminably long period of time, an eternity, light years..." A light year is a measure of distance, not of time; it is the DISTANCE traveled by light in a year's time.

I have a tarot deck called Sentenzia, with designs on each card made out of German words variously colored and arranged. Clearly, they are wordles.

"Yea" and "nay" do persist in standard English all over the United States and many other English-speaking areas in one situation - voting by voice, as in business meetings.

Not only is "hither, thither, and yon" - and variations with two of the three words- about the only place one finds "yon" used these day, it is also about the only place one finds "thither", and while "hither" occasionally shows up without either "thither...