Even as a child, I was fascinated by language, by the variety and origins of words and phrases, by dictionaries (and other reference works). One of the indelible memories from my grad school experience at the Simmons College School of Library and Information Science was a book I read about the longtime editor of the Oxford English Dictionary.
After retiring as a librarian, I started a new blog on word and phrase origins. (I even named it after the title of that book: Caught in the Web of Words.)
In addition to the blog, I’ve been doing other etymological work, including working with Paul Dickson both on antedating earliest uses of baseball terms in his Dickson Baseball Dictionary and on his in-progress dictionary of World War II terms. I also contribute etymological information to Wikipedia.
This page provides links to many of those activities.
- Etymology Blog
- Baseball Etymology
- Wikipedia (Selected Etymology Entries, Edits, & Additions)
- First Responder
- Information Explosion (antedated)
- Murderer’s Row
- Jungle Juice
- Goldilocks Economy
- Tex-Mex
- Sex Kitten
- Kangaroo Court
- Sliced Bread
- ….plus several baseball-related terms