(The name for W is "double-u", from the days when U was printed V, so the relation between [w] and [ u] is reflected in W's name.) Except in German, where the letter is pronounced as "v", and the name is something like "Doppel-v". Which gives us "Fau-vay" for...

A meaning I associate with "drag" is to attend an event with a date, as in "stag (without) or drag (with)". In particular, I associate it with the U.S. Naval Academy in the 1950s, when one's date was referred to as a "drag". It almost certainly predates that, but that's...

My initial reaction was that it was a misspelling of "parity", but that seems not to be the case. Perhaps a more comprehensible way to describe it is by example. In math, if a function q is dependent on x and y, the arity of q is 2. (And to make the topic itself more evident, the original,...

From a technical discussion in which I've been taking part: arity is the number of arguments or operands taken by a function or operator. I don't think it has made its way into any "major" dictionary yet; I had to look it up so that I wouldn't have to ask, and thus appear too much of a Lud...

Nobody has yet mentioned "She Stoops to Conquer", a Restoration farce by Oliver Goldsmith. Only metaphorical stooping going on.

Precipitated by seeing the term "book-banners" in a Wall Street Journal book review this morning. That's quite different (I think) from the more usual meaning of a waving flag or 72-point headline on a newspaper page.

Regarding the unrelated version, it's a little broader than curb -- usually the front steps of a rowhouse, where city families would gather and talk to their neighbors on warm summer evenings.

The French "accent aigu" is simply "acute" in English. And I learned to pronounce the other one as "grahv", but my French teacher was very strict; on the other hand, I've never heard it pronounced otherwise during my life in typography.

Well, whales aren't fish (although in some old chanteys they're called "whalefish", same as German "Walfisch", and one song is known as "The Greenland fishery"), but going out to catch them is called "whaling". (And that has a secondary meaning of a punishment...

But in the US, "Esq." has become an indication that the individual so designated is an attorney, and can be found attached even to a woman's name.

But wouldn't that be "circumambulate"? As in, "While in Vienna, I circumambulated the Bösendorfer piano factory."

Because today is dismal, having just stopped raining, and threatening to start raining again. Apparently from Latin dies mali , "evil days", its meaning expanded to describe environment, hence the Dismal Swamp. In sound and meaning it blends well with "drizzle", so "drzzmal&...

Particularly New England islands, I think. Strangers who have settled in, even after many years, and perhaps even a generation or two, are called "washashores" by the "natives". (I don't know what those "natives" were called by the indigenes, but it was probably less po...

Then, whence cometh avenue and boulevard? (Via French, I know, but am too distracted to look up the etymology.) The little street that I live on, exactly one block long, has an official sign "Langham Road" at one end and "Langham Street" at the other. (The Post Office delivers to...

There are also the lists in which knights in armor tried to unseat their opponents in a jousting tournament. A variation on such tournaments, still known as jousting, consists of riding one's charger at full tilt, trying to snare a suspended ring; this is one of the state sports in Maryland. It can ...