Words words words words words words words.
Diacritical Thinking
diacritics, history
Umlauts are not diaereses, explains Jonathon Owen this week at Arrant Pedantry. What are we talking about here? Twö lïttle döts thät äppear äböve a lëtter, a diacritic mark that we don’t see in English often outside of The New Yorker. Though an umlaut and a diaeresis look exactly the same on the page, they serve two different purposes and developed along two completely different routes.Epicenter Fielder
vocabulary, word history
There sure seem to be a lot of epicenters of this pandemic — Wuhan, China; Bergamo, Italy; New York City; New Orleans. It’s as if maybe epicenter — the spot on the Earth’s surface directly above the source of an earthquake — isn’t the best word to use to describe a viral hotspot. “[U]sing a word created for another kind of disaster might actually hurt our response to this one,” writes Ben Zimmer for Politico in “Is ‘Epicenter’ the Wrong Word for New York?”Video of the Week
languages, video
Not Your Granddad’s Grand Adz
etymology, word history
Under regular circumstances, adz is just a convenient word for getting rid of the Z tile in a game of Scrabble, but this week, it is the subject of an etymological exploration by Anatoly Liberman at the Oxford University Press Blog. Turns out, the ultimate source of the words is a mystery, but Liberman has a theory.Tell-Tale Cocktail
word history, spirits
Somehow I missed that last Tuesday was National Cocktail Day, so I’ve been celebrating it every day since. To mark the day, Angela Tung at Wordnik took a closer look at a number of cocktail terms, including jigger, nip, sling, and cocktail itself.
Original featured image by Eduard von Grützner.