BOOK REVIEW: The Oldale Curiosity Shop

“Who, or Why, or Which, or What: A Global Gazetteer of the Instructive and Strange” by John Oldale – London and New-York, Particular Books (Penguin Group), 2011 The classic gazetteer is a numbing compilation of places: their names, their coordinates in an attendant...

Chairty Publishes "Ulithian" Dictionary for Pacific Islanders

Charity Publishes Dictionary For Remote Micronesian IslandersThe picturesque Atoll of Ulithi, located in the Central Pacific, is home to 700 islanders. These Micronesians live on a chain of coral islands a thousand miles east of the Philippines. Most have learned to read and...

Doug Ross Exposes Media's Pack Mentality

Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary offers several definitions of the word, "pack." When it comes to members of the mainstream media and their treatment of the subject of Americans without health insurance, blogger Doug Ross found that one definition is most applicable: "A...

Merriam-Webster's word of '07: 'w00t'

"SPRINGFIELD, Mass. - Expect cheers among hardcore online game enthusiasts when they learn Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year. Or, more accurately, expect them to "w00t." "W00t," a hybrid of letters and numbers used by gamers as an exclamation of happiness or triumph, topped...

horizon - etymology & story - podictionary 560

Henry Kissinger once said: "“For other nations, Utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is just beyond the horizon.”" This sounds like a nice sentiment but perhaps Kissinger should have chosen another word than horizon.  As Mark Pattison, a...

press - etymology & story - podictionary 558

In old movies you sometimes see the reporter elbowing his way through the crowd with a fedora on his head and stuck into the band of the hat is a little sign “press.”  These days we talk about the media more than the press and this is appropriate because the news...

destination - etymology & story - podictionary 557

The Oxford American Dictionary of Current English defines destination as: "“a place to which a person or thing is going”" This is in fact one of those examples of human laziness because this sense of destination is actually short for the phrase place of destination. The...

ponder - etymology & story - podictionary 556

To ponder something is to think about it.  Although the first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is for ponder as a noun, the verb, as we use it, actually has a longer history.  It appears first in the written record in the late 1300s and not surprisingly...

text - etymology & story - podictionary 555

The other day I was listening to a radio piece about teenagers driving, what with all the grad parties that had been going on.  What struck me was one cop’s description of impaired driving that extended beyond driving drunk.  She said drivers were sometimes...