Skeptophilia

My master's degree is in historical linguistics, and one of the first things I learned was that it's tricky to tell if two words are...

We were having dinner with our younger son a while back, and he asked if there was a common origin for the - naut  in astronaut  and the nau...

I've been fascinated with words ever since I can remember.  It's no real mystery why I became a writer, and (later) got my master...

I noticed last week that the spine was torn on my Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology .  It's a case of simple overuse.  Some people ...

It's been a while since I've posted on anything of a purely etymological nature, which is kind of a shame.  I'm a bit of a fanat...

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Nabisco creating a hermetically-sealed, bomb-proof vault on the island of Svalbard, with the sole purpo...

One of the things I find amusing about people who argue over the meaning of passages in the Bible is that so few of them seem to recognize t...

With all of the controversy right now over the upcoming presidential election, the conflicts over gun rights and federal land ownership, and...

There has been a rather unfortunate upswing lately in sites that have names like "The Dark Truth About ____," and which try to put...

One of the (many) reasons I love science is that as a process, it opens up avenues to knowledge that were previously thought closed.  Couple...

It's been a while since I've posted on anything of a linguistic nature, which is kind of a shame.  I'm a bit of a fanatic for wo...