Lots of people use chiropractic medicine to ease their pains, my wife included. In a discussion with a soon-to-be chiropracter, I asked about the origins of the nouns chiropractic and chiropractor. Alas, he did not know. My curiosity piqued, I did some searching; here is what I found. Chiropractic is from the Greek words "cheir" (hand) and "praktikos" (efficient) but was suggested in its combined form by the Rev. Samuel Weed of Bloomington, IL, an early patient. In 189 … (full article)

It's a week before election day, which made me wonder about the the donkey and the elephant and the origins of these as symbols for our two major political parties. Many people seem to know that the donkey was first used as the symbol for the Democratic Party by the cartoonist Thomas Nast, but few can describe the cartoon of birth. The Democratic donkey was born January 15, 1870, in an editorial cartoon by Mr. Nast captioned "A Live Jackass Kicking a Dead Lion." The do … (full article)

"The real McCoy" is a slang expression that means the genuine article, the real thing. I don't hear it used much anymore but I came across it recently, which made me wonder about its origin. I thought its origin was in the legendary Hatfield-McCoy feud, but I was wrong. In the United States, McCoy seems to have originally meant a good quality whiskey or beer (ca. 1908), so I would guess that McCoy was the maker's name. Also in the United States, the expression "the rea … (full article)

We all are familiar with Webster's Dictionary, and associate Daniel Webster with the first edition of an American English dictionary. Many of us are also familiar with the story of Daniel Webster and the Devil (which, for you opera lovers, is also quite a good American opera). But ol' Daniel has given his name to other things as well, albeit unwittingly. For example, there is the Webster fly, a large black fly, great numbers of which were in Daniel's neighborhood after … (full article)

Sometimes my mind makes some odd transitions, and today was one of those days. I was reading one of the many magazines to which I subscribe, when I began to think about blind. Nothing I was reading seemed a likely trigger, but there I was, thinking about blind. So I did some checking, and this week's Americanism is blind. Well we all know of today's common uses -- window blinds, an inability to see, a hunter's blind, and so forth -- but how was blind used in the olden, … (full article)

With the November elections approaching and the campaign season beginning in earnest, I started thinking about politicians being absent from when it's time to vote (and voting by show of hands rather than on the record), from their districts unless they need to raise money, from representing all their constituents and not just the few with money, from restraining spending taxpayer dollars on bridges to nowhere or to give themselves better health and retirement benefits (I … (full article)

When I first came across "abisselfa," I thought it was just gibberish; but I was wrong. Although now an obsolete term, abisselfa, a noun, is how the letter "a" was denominated when it formed a syllable by itself. The term is a contraction of "a by itself, a." In 1835, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet (1790-1870) authored "Georgia Scenes, Characters, Incidents, &c., in the First Half Century of the Republic," a book of humorous sketches about social life and customs he obser … (full article)

Today, when we see ABC, we probably think of the alphabet, as in “she is learning her ABCs,” or as an acronym for American Broadcasting Company or Association of Booksellers for Children, or one of many other things. But how many of us associate ABC with a card game called A-B-C or with a gambling device that no one today recalls? These are the first of our Americanisms to explore. The A-B-C card game was played in late 19th century America and was a game playable by a … (full article)

My exposure to this topic came in the late 1970s when I was teaching a college credit course in calligraphy. One of my first educationist chores was to find alphabetical phrases (= abecedaria) for homework exercises. That was when I also became aware of the paucity of this challenging application of prose. In the United States the most well known abecedarian is the moralistic, schoolroom favorite, The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The author of this popular phrase … (full article)