I was reading Nightmare Abbey the other day, when I came upon this opening line in a piece of dialogue: Permit me to discept. 'Eh?...

The other day I happened to use the word skinflint , and even as the word was popping out of my mouth, it occurred to me to wonder where o...

The word extravaganza was imported from the Italian to describe an extravagant type of writing that was terribly popular in the nineteenth...

A very observant reader has posted on the Dear Dogberry page asking why there aren't more rhymes for plinth. She observes that: I ca...

Read no further. The following post will be utterly obscene. Filth. Beginning to end lewdness and blueness. If you desperately need a resp...

Once upon a time, there was a Latin word fumare that meant to smoke, from which we get fumes . Now, some smoke is a welcome guest in the ...

The Latin word for cloud was nubes and, as a result, some eighteenth century classicist invented the lovely word enubilate , which meant ...