There is an adjective "quaffable" in the family. Not entirely complementary. A quote from Hugh Johnson's Pocket Book of Wines: ". . . versatile white from near Ancona on Adriatic; light and quaffable or sparkling and structured . . . "

I believe something is missing in the two or three sentences in this essay. The last portion of "Word History" reads "Swedish os "smell, odor" belongs to this group, too. but we find (An e-bow is due our old friend, Lew Jury, for rescuing this lovely garden path Good Word fr...

I think this sentence is an example of what brogan is talking about (but I'm not sure. I could be wrong). I think the choice of "RSVP" as the title for the subject is misleading. "RSVP" per se is not the intended topic for discussion but a request of Agorans to respond as Slava a...

whoops

Herbert Hoover died in 1964 and Dorthy Parker in 1967, so she might have said it on hearing of Hoover's death, but the “Enjoyment of Laughter” by Max Eastman published in 1936 attributes the quote to Ms Parker and said she said it in response to hearing of Calvin Coolidge' death. Silent Cal died in ...

Bbeeton recently posted a link to a webpage that was a little confused as to what a "Native American Language" might be. Then I read an article in The New Yorker than mentioned inter alia that Alexander von Humboldt introduced the use of guano as fertilizer to Europe and that the word &quo...

There are problems with the "succotash" entry as well. Etymonline has this to say 1751, from a word in a Southern New England Algonquian language, such as Narragansett misckquatash "boiled whole kernels of corn." Used by 1793 in New England in reference to a dish of boiled corn a...

My German-English dictionary has an entry for anfecht-en which it calls an irregular transitive verb. It includes anfechtung as a related member of the family. The glosses are "attack, assail, combat; contest, impugn, challenge; trouble; tempt; was ficht dich an? - what's the matter with you?; ...

I learned this verb from the landlord/owner of the hotel where I worked in Bavaria one summer while in university. The set up is a sergeant orders the private to do something, but the private demurs saying "Ich speise" (I dine). The sergeant shouts "Der Kaiser speist, Ich esse und du ...

Maggots?

But is "cryptic" in the example "When Phil Anders asked June McBride for her hand in marriage, her reply was a cryptic, 'Maybe.'" an example of "cryptic" is sense three, short and curt, or sense two, enigmatic? If June McBride had answered "no" or "yes,&q...

David, it was just so much bardolatry.

"Under the color of law" has been around for quite awhile. The NGRAM Viewer turned up this from 1828. "We ask no more for the churches than what most obviously belongs to them, their right of self-preservation, self-organization, of controlling their own property, and managing, genera...

The gustoes with which the vegans and the carnivores attacked the buffet were vastly different.

According to what you, Slava, like to call the internot and supported by NASA and the Farmers' Almanac, all the terms you listed for referring to the first full moon in March were applied in various indigenous languages of North Eastern North America. (The sources cited below don't provide informati...