éclaircissements

Category: Words, Words, Words

  • A Pocket of One’s Own

    From ages 7 to let’s say 10 but honestly it was older than 10, my at first most-prized and later on most-loved possession was my Felicity American Girl doll. Like all of the historical American G’s, Felicity had a backstory — she was from colonial Williamsburg, and her father was a shopkeeper and a revolutionary who…

  • Bradykinesia, Infinite Jest, and The End of the Tour

    I haven’t seen The End of the Tour yet, though the first fumbling, bandana’ed seconds of the trailer sold me. I liked Jason Segal in Forgetting Sarah Marshal; he brought a earnest, kind pathos to a role lesser comedic actors would have made merely whinging and pathetic. From the End of the Tour trailer, it…

  • The Farrago of Infinitely Polar Bear

    Farrago is a synonym for hodgepodge — “a confused mix,” per the dictionary. Today, we went to see Infinitely Polar Bear, a biopic of sorts about a bipolar Bostonian and the eighteen months he spent caring for his two young daughters while their mother went to business school, in New York. The movie itself is…

  • Etymology: Ruckus/Rumpus

    A friend, in a fundraising email for a summer camp, wrote that the camp’s mission statement contains the line: “To create a youthful ruckus of adventure and spirit where souls are ripened and freedom is discovered.” First of all, that is fantastic, and exactly what all camps should be, rather than the dull monotony of…

  • Etymology: Picnic

    Apart from thermoses of Progresso Chicken Noodle and stacks of Pad Thai in bending foil containers, scarfed in intervals during summer swim meets, picnics were not a regular occurrence in my household. We ate too fast, for one thing; for another, the schedules of four/sometimes six/sometimes seven kids didn’t leave much time for lolling about on…

  • Etymology: Marshmallow

    My previous post had me wondering about the origin of the word “marshmallow.” It’s a beautiful compound, if you can squeeze out the primary-colored bubble letters it’s normally written in. I had vague recollections of a Burt’s Bees marsh mallow face cream, which made me think the mucilaginous candy had plant-based origins, and indeed, it does.…

  • On Tenterhooks

    …was a phrase I wrote today, and then I realized that while I knew what the phrase meant (“a state of [painful] nervousness over a future event”), I didn’t know what a tenterhook was. I wasn’t even sure it was “tenTerhook” and not “tenDerhook.” The T has it. A tenterhook is a long, crude-looking hook use…

  • Blue Smiles and Cable Salad, or 2/52 of the Value of Elle Frances Sanders’ Illustrated Ode to Untranslatable Words

    A while back, I stumbled upon a wonderful roundup of 11 untranslatable words on the travel site Maptia. My favorite was the German word waldeinsamkeit, which roughly translates to “the feeling of being alone in the woods” — though the Italian culacchino, “the mark left on a table by a cold glass” — has also come…