I find there is a particular charm in the linguistic gymnastics of the Southern lexicon. Among my favorite uniquely Southern terms are: cattywampus, lolollygag, piddling, tarnation, and conniption. I also take great delight in picturesque descriptions like: plumb tuckered, fixin’ to, tump...

“It was a dark and stormy night.”

Edward Bulwer-Lytton penned those words, the opening sentence of his 1830 novel, Paul Clifford. Teachers and critics have often-mocked and parodied the line as an overwrought example of purple prose.

Despite Bulwer-Lytton’s florid melodrama, he...

While perusing the dusty shelves of an antiquarian bookshop recently, I ran across a well-worn copy of Rich Hall’s Sniglets, under a stack of Calvin and Hobbes classics. Subtitled, Words that Don’t Appear in the Dictionary, but Should, the little illustrated paperback is a collection...

“Once upon a time…”

When we hear those very familiar words, we know that whatever follows is likely to be a story—perhaps a fairy tale or a fable or a morality tale.

“Once upon a time, there were three little pigs.”

Or, “Once upon a time there was...

These days, there is hardly anything more dismissive than saying that something is a myth. Urban myths are fake news. Ancient myths are old news. They are legends, fables, fairy tales, pulp from the rumor mill. They are lies even larger than statistics.

According to Merriam-Webster, a myth is...

I love reading letters. And, not just the letters addressed to me in the post. I love reading the letters of great men and women of the past. I have dozens of books in my library that catalog the correspondence of heroes like Samuel Rutherford, Thomas Chalmers, Charles Spurgeon, Andrew Bonar,...

In his classic book, The Holiness of God, R.C. Sproul bemoans the absence from our vocabulary of certain, once-familiar, King James Version words. It wasn’t so much the loss of antiquated verb forms like walketh and talketh, or sayest and mayest that bothered him. It wasn’t obsolete...

In his 1915 Cambridge lecture, On Jargon, Arthur Quiller-Couch, declared, “There is metaphor; there is ornament; there is a sense of poetry. But, no such gusto marks, no such zeal animates, the practitioners of jargon. Jargon stalks unchecked in our midst. It has become the language of...

Poet, literary critic, and novelist, Arthur Quiller-Couch, was best known for his incomparable anthology, The Oxford Book of English Verse. As a lecturer at Oxford beginning in 1886 and a professor at Cambridge from 1912 to 1944, he taught an entire generation of English writers how to write.

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What do sandwiches and sideburns, boycotts and bloomers, martinis and mausoleums all have in common?

Well, the same thing that knickers and Nikes, fedoras and Fabians, derbies and derringers have in common. They are all eponyms.

Eponyms are names that have, over time, become familiar words. So,...