We covered slang terms for money on a recent program (wtcmradio.com). Among the offerings called in was “filthy lucre.” Lucre came from a Latin word, lucrum, which meant profit. But already in Roman times, a negative connotation began to creep in....

I was a bit surprised to see that the Oxford English Dictionary has doubts about the usual etymology for the word belligerent. My fading memory told me that it came from the Latin word for war (bellum) and from the Latin verb gerere, to wage or carry...

Maurice from Rochester asked about terms that can express the constant flow of days represented by the words yesterday, today, and tomorrow. I’ll warn up front that some of them are obsolete, but I suppose that they could be revived. YESTERDAY In...

CNBC ran a story Friday afternoon about a lumberjack who has made it to the finals of the World Series of Poker. Whoever the on-scene reporter was, he chided one of the studio talking heads for using the term card sharp instead of what the reporter...

In American composition classes, brackets are reserved for editorial intervention; if you interrupt yourself with an interpolation, parentheses ( ) are preferred. Dashes and commas may also signal authorial asides, of course, but they are practically...