Today’s bandiers of obscenity could learn a thing or two from Greek. The post The Four-Letter Failure appeared first on The American Conservative .
Takimag The Four-Letter Failure Today’s bandiers of obscenity could learn a thing or two from Greek. TakiMag Photo by Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images As an unfortunate birthday approaches, my movie director friend Michael Mailer asked what wish I’m about to make: “Keira and Lily, I’d even give them up for Americans to stop using the F-word,” was my answer. Be it used as an adverb, noun, or verb, the F-word is now as ubiquitous as “hello” once was, proof that the barbarians have breached the gates and are now lords of the manor. Hollywood, of course, heads the mob of vulgarians, inserting…Open
In this installment of NPR's Word of the Week, we go to camp: from 16th-century military lodgings to the wilderness adventures of the 1880s designed to turn boys into "manly men."
It's often a derogatory term used to describe digital dinosaurs and technophobes. That wasn't always the case. NPR's Word of the Week looks back at the not so backwards-looking Luddites.
In the 9th century, Muhammad ibn Musa al-Kharizmi helped solidify the concept of algorithms in mathematics and popularized algebra and the use of the zero.
There are theories that "love" in the tennis context has French, English or Dutch origins. But like many words, historians and language experts say it's hard to pin down the "right" answer.
Today, most people know the word as a synonym for "destroy." But fewer realize its origins — or that it's come to mean something strikingly different than it once did.