by Dictionary Scoop You learn your colors before kindergarten, but how did they get their names? And what did we call “orange” first, was it the color or the fruit? Let’s explore the multi-hued history of how color names came to be! 1-Blue “Blue” comes from the Old French word bleu, which in …
Category Archives: language
The Phrases We Use When Things Are Easy
by Dictionary Scoop Some things in life are so simple and effortless that they deserve their own colorful descriptions. It wasn’t difficult to compile these ten phrases: 1-I can do it in my sleep We all have that one recipe we know by heart—the one we turn to whenever we want to impress …
Regional Speech Patterns Travel With You
by Kevin Burton One fine morning in a restaurant we don’t often go to, in a small town where you better not speed or they’ll fine you for sure (Derby, Kansas), a waitress referred to my wife and I as “yins.” That is a contraction of “you ones” and it’s a regionalism from …
Complicated Lingo Of Science Made Easy
by Dictionary Scoop Give it a bit of time, and even the tiniest, most obscure corner of human knowledge will develop its own terminology. And the biggest generator of a specific lexicon in the world is science. Stepping into the realm of scientific discovery, we encounter a captivating linguistic landscape adorned with unusual …
Savoring Food Words From Merriam-Webster
by Kevin Burton After last week’s posts about the Food Network, we set the table once more with words about food from our friends at Merriam-Webster dictionary. I have heard the chefs on TV drop some of these words, but other words on the list sound more like Roman or Jewish names from …
That’s More Like It!, Real Scrabble Strategy
by Kevin Burton My mom and I have played a lot of Scrabble over the years. Neither of us pursued victory by waiting around for jawbreaker words such as the one ones featured in yesterday’s Scrabble post. Muzjiks? Bezique? Quetzal? Let me know when you get those sets of letters on your rack! …
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Interesting But Hard-To-Play Scrabble Words
by Kevin Burton As usual, Dictionary Scoop has an interesting list today. But this one has next to no value. It’s a list of the biggest, bangiest Scrabble words. The words that if successfully deployed, would bring the highest scores. But your chances of ever having these exact letters on your board …
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Twelve Legal Terms Everyone Should Know
by Dictionary Scoop If you have ever been befuddled by a legal term in a conversation, a document, TV, or elsewhere, you are certainly not alone. The law has a certain way with words and it can be tricky for the layman to fully understand their meaning. This article serves as a humble …
Plant Names That Sound Like Insults
by Kevin Burton If you’re not good at gardening, you can say that you have a “brown thumb.” You can say it, I won’t. Yes the antonym of “green thumb” which speaks to people who are good at gardening is “brown thumb.” But that sounds much worse than it needs to, so I’ll …
In God Is The Only Certainty We Have
by Kevin Burton The words of Job, speaking of our loving, caring God, lend us comfort and certainty today. We sorely need comfort and certainty in today’s troubled times. To say they are welcome is an extreme understatement. But we don’t often pluck them from the book of Job, at least I …
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