How did the famous trilby hat get its name? Here’s a question for you: what was the biggest-selling novel of the Victorian era? And who wrote it – Dickens perhaps? George Eliot? Robert Louis Stevenson? It was none of these, though they all enjoyed huge sales. Instead, the accolade arguably […]
The interesting history of ‘unfriend’ The word ‘unfriend’ is, like the word ‘muggle’, one that has a curious history: ‘unfriend’ had a life before Facebook. Its principal meaning now is to delete somebody as a friend on a social media side, especially Facebook, but it has been used variously as […]
The interesting origins of dystopia The word ‘dystopia’ is well-known as the opposite, or antonym of ‘utopia’. ‘Utopia’ owes its existence to Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), whose 1516 work Utopia introduced the word into English (though More’s book was actually written in Latin). Utopia is a pun, designed to put […]
The interesting origins of a curious word The most widely known and widely used meaning of the word ‘muggle’ is probably the one that J. K. Rowling invented for her Harry Potter series of books: namely, a person who does not possess magical skills. Normally written with a capital M, […]
The origins of a blatantly curious word The meaning of the word ‘blatant’ is, one suspects, blatantly obvious. But how it arrived at its modern meaning is not. The word has a curious history within the world of English poetry, and ‘blatant’ took its time to arrive at its modern […]