Why recovery after a hip fracture is about more than bones
For many older adults, a hip fracture arrives without warning, suddenly changing the course of daily life.
OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.
Tearing apart a book
For several years, I taught a course on the history of publishing.
OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.
Sit thee down, sorrow!
It is easier, following Shakespeare, to tell sorrow to sit down than to discover where the word sorrow came from.
OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.
Hogs, hedges, hedgehogs, and BA’s
About a year ago (to be exact, on February 19, 2025), I discussed the origin of some obscure idioms, the hardest of which was to go the whole hog, though a hog on ice also makes one wonder.
OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.
<i>Unabridged</i>: some thoughts on a new book about dictionaries and words
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An etymological ham<i>burg</i>er
My thanks are to Keith Ritchie, who in his comment on the previous post noted that in Scotland, trousers are still called breeches. Unintentionally, today’s word also begins with the letter b, as the italicized part of the title indicates, but it has nothing to do with clothes.
OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.
Implicit negation is easy to miss
One of the odder bits of language use is the phenomenon of overnegation, or misnegation.
OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.
Endless trouble with <i>breeches</i>
The trouble begins with the pronunciation of the word breeches. Why does breeches (seemingly so, in the US) often rhyme with riches, rather than reaches?
OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.
Americana: enter hillbilly. Moby Dick follows
This is a continuation of the previous post, devoted to all kinds of country bumpkins. Hillbilly looks like the most uninspiring word to discuss: it is so obviously made up of hill + billy.
OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.
Hobnobbing with a hillbilly
It is unimaginable how many denigrating names people have invented for our breadwinners and shepherds! Those names were, I assume, coined by city dwellers who did not want to soil their hands with earth and manure.
OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.
