The word mother is strikingly similar in languages all across the world: From Swedish (mamma) to Swahili (mama), Czech (matka) to Chinese (mama), most use some combination of the same two sounds, m and ah, to refer to the female parent. This consistency across space and time makes physiological sense, the pioneering linguist Roman Jakobson explained. One of the easiest sounds for a baby to make is ah.
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If you’ve ever tussled with our daily mini crossword puzzles, you can most likely blame Paolo Pasco. The good news is that the constructor who stumped you is now the champion of the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament at the ripe old age of 23. The ACPT is the largest speed-solving tournament in the world, this year welcoming more than 800 competitors.
Don’t want to miss a single column? Sign up to get Caleb’s writing in your inbox.The ancient Greeks called it katabasis: a test of heroism by descent into the underworld. The deeper you go, the more difficult the journey becomes. But if you can withstand the heat as you approach eternal damnation, you return to Earth’s surface with the wisdom to transcend mortal fear. This mythic quest has long captured the cultural imagination, from Orpheus to Barbarian.
Don’t want to miss a single column? Sign up to get Caleb’s writing in your inbox.Perhaps no morpheme has been more crucial to understanding the current cultural moment than meta. I first remember hearing it in high school, an echo across the East River from Brooklyn during the Obama-era hipster boom. On a basic level, meta meant recursive or self-referential—like a warning sign warning you about warning signs or a coffee-table book about coffee tables.
Sign up for Caleb’s newsletter here.The tumult of 2020 generated a host of new words to describe our changed circumstances. All of a sudden, everyone remembered the Before Times, essential workers needed to be distinguished from the rest of us, and socializing in a pod wasn’t just for the whales. As things got worse and stayed that way, a new form of speaking about the turmoil of our physical and emotional reality took hold.
Sign up for Caleb’s newsletter here.The first things that could “go off” were weapons. Starting in the 16th century, to go off meant to explode in a decisive spurt of energy. Even as the more literal meaning of “to depart physically, to wander” followed close behind, the phrase retained the sudden dramatic shock of its inception.
Sign up for Caleb’s newsletter here.Language lets us taste the world around us all the time without ever opening our mouth. You don’t have to lick your smack-talking friend to know they’re salty, nor must you nibble on the Hollywood celebrity who took the lead role in a Broadway play to know their performance is hammy. Gym rats with no genetic relationship to cows are beefy, and fishy situations arise all the time in environments completely unsuitable for marine life.
What is love? Reader, don’t hurt me. Just etymologically. I’ll try.It may be the slipperiest word in the English language. We are constantly asserting its meaning and renegotiating its definition, especially in pop culture.
Sign up for Caleb’s newsletter here.This week I want to take a break from our usual format and write about the biggest news in the word-puzzle community since the invention of the anagram. By now, you’ve probably heard about Wordle 10 times over from friends and followers alike. The daily word game, originally created by the software developer Josh Wardle to amuse his partner during pandemic downtime, quickly became a viral sensation.
Sign up for Caleb’s newsletter here.“You know something, we ain’t never really had no old money,” the Migos member Offset begins the trio’s 2016 megahit, “Bad and Boujee.” “We got a whole lot of new money, though.
Sign up for Caleb’s newsletter here.English words constantly evolve, not only in terms of what they mean, but how they mean. They transform their parts of speech all the time without so much as a changed syllable. The adjective green came to mean the part of the golf course that can be described by this adjective. The prepositions up and down came to mean the experiences in life that feel like the spatial relationships that these prepositions describe—life’s ups and downs.
Like a suspenseful story or a taut tightrope, a good word can carry a sense of internal tension. This is most evident in a portmanteau, where multiple words are smashed together to form a new word that combines their meanings (it’s named after the portmanteau suitcase, which opens into two separate compartments). Bromance, labradoodle, Chamillionaire: A collision of two words yields a natural sense of drama.
Sign up for Caleb’s newsletter here.In The Matrix, Morpheus, a cool bald guy wearing sunglasses and a black crocodile trench coat, offers Keanu Reeves (and, by extension, the audience) a choice. Morpheus has just shown us that the world we thought was real is merely a simulation, and that the actual real world is mired in an interminable, violent power struggle between robots and humans. He proffers two capsules, one in each hand (they are reflected in his tiny sunglass lenses).
Sign up for Caleb’s newsletter here.The first time I heard the phrase It’s giving, I admit that I was mystified. A friend showed me a pre–Met Gala Instagram post by the pop star Camila Cabello: a picture of her face with small circles of makeup next to her eyes, each a different reddish shade, to which she had given the caption, “It’s giving … dots.