The hand-drawn illustrations add a wonderful, personal touch, too.

I write a blog on etymology, have been for 13 years. I usually draw my topics from news. No Substack. No video. No monetization. Strictly no AI. I pay to keep it ad-free. Visit? Get the content—no hoops. You can subscribe, but I'm not in your face about it. Just a guy doin' a thing: mashedradish.com

Rollins and Hawkins in the last minute of 'Lover Man' on their 1963 'Sonny Meets Hawk!' My God. Great art grabs you—and doesn't let you go. Their playing here leaves me breathless, my heart quickened, every time.

Culture Gabfest was long a staple of mine. It kept me engaged and au courant. I'll miss it. As I do Hang Up and Listen, for which I've not found a replacement. Don't suspect I will for either. I hope the trio ended on their own terms, not due to other pressures. 18 years is a long-ass time!

Wow, a legit (and dismaying) use case for the usually humorous verb DEFENESTRATE. Someone in my apartment building is defenestrating dog shit. Which also means, cruelly, they aren't taking their dog out.

Free the Rooster

Holy geez, are you fuckers in for a treat. @sesquiotic.bsky.social had a cocktail or two over the weekend and recorded his translations of passages from Beowulf (plus the original Old English of the intro). stronglang.wordpress.com/2026/06/01/w...

Wow, new racisms just dropped from my favorite high school classmate. Vivek always grubbed his way to first in this, top of that. Give him some kind of a 'prize' for effortlessly packing in an astonishing density of racism in under 20 seconds. Aghast, sickened.

And the trend is especially humiliating for our elderly, who are subjected to the indignity of this when, like, trying to run a quick errand in downtown Dayton, OH.

This was one was always an Etymology in the Wild for me. Passed by his house growing up all the time. Heimlich was a big Cincinnati figure, as were his kids—including his son, Peter, who dedicated himself to exposing his father as a con, apparently.

The New York Knicks might literally be called the New York Toy Marble Bakers. Which is pretty tough, if you ask me.

Like me, you probably knew KNICKS is short for KNICKERBOCKERS. Like me, you probably did ~not~ know KNICKERBOCKERS goes back to a character Washington Irving created in a satire of historiography, the name via a famed NY Dutch family only incidentally called that. mashedradish.com/2026/05/30/k...

Or, how the Sleep Hollow guy riffed up the name for an NBA team and a style of pants.

Etymology in the news: SLUSH FUND (/9) I think many of us have gotten so used to Trump’s corruption that it barely shocks us anymore. His $1.8 billion slush fund, however, is proving an exception.

One more time, I wrote about Google’s plan to kill off its own search function. www.sfgate.com/tech/article...

Now that I'm a sixth-grade teacher, I have Primus's "Mrs. Blaileen"*(**) playing in my head on repeat. *IYKYK. **I will not be like Mrs. Blaileen.

It had been a (blessed) minute since I had to use Zoom. This is what I saw when I opened the app. It took me a (wretched) minute to find where I could, you know, do thing we do on Zoom.

In case you needed any more evidence that AI is—I'm going to use the word—evil: If you work or volunteer in a school or program connected to the Catholic Church, you have to complete frequent, regular trainings on child sexual abuse. The latest? "The Emerging Use of AI to Groom Targets." God.

"I don't know, can you? It's 'may' tuna dry beans, Johnny. It's 'may.'"

Perspective: He paid more for those seats than my YEARLY SALARY as a PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHER in Ohio. I went to high school with Vivek. He's still playing the same con now as then. It's just got a higher price tag—and stakes for Ohio. That it has a higher cringe factor is ... some small consolation?

Correct: all etymological facts are fun. And the most fun etymological facts of them all? The unsolicited ones!

'Forumnal' is inspired, though.

Ebola has a lot in common with hantavirus—including that they are both named after rivers. In the case of 'Ebola,' French-speaking Belgian colonists couldn't handle the labio-velar consonant 'gb' in its native name, 'Legbala,' in Ngbandi.

"How lucky to be asked to do the most that you can do." This. This. I remind myself of a version this in my head each day, each bell, before my students come into my English class—with all the joyous middle-school chaos they bring with them.

Have you read Beowulf? No you haven't. And especially not like this. Well, you fucking should. Or anyway the fight between Beowulf and Grendel, which is short enough that you'd get through it. @sesquiotic.bsky.social brings it to you. stronglang.wordpress.com/2026/05/19/w...

I just read an article in The Street about spending habits costing us fortunes. It then listed housing, transportation, and food. I'm sorry, but how are these spending habits? How do I have control over them in Trump's immiserating economy?

Certainly a literary homage to Arch Oboler's "The Author and the Thing," which is a banger... www.oldtimeradiodownloads.com/thriller/lig...

"If there were a beautiful poverty, a moral poverty in America, that would be subversive. Therefore it has to be ugly." Damn, Saul Bellow. Just damn. (From Herzog.)

I love this sign students made for an anti-vaping campaign at the middle school where I teach. I love it on its own terms, but also because it alludes to Keith Haring's 1986 "Crack is Wack" mural in NYC. The similarity in the lettering does lead me to believe the allusion may have been knowing!

What is the HANTA- in HANTAVIRUS? Come for the mini-lesson in Korean. Stay for the 9th-century, one-eyed monk who thought he could read minds. mashedradish.com/2026/05/14/h...

What is the HANTA- in HANTAVIRUS? Come for the mini-lesson in Korean. Stay for the 9th-century, one-eyed monk who thought he could read minds. mashedradish.com/2026/05/14/h...

I've been back in the middle-school classroom for half a year now. Here are the 2 main student relationships to AI I'm seeing: 1. "That's AI": the go-to taunt for anything perceived as fake 2. The immediacy & ubiquity of Google AI overview drowning out critical thinking and research

Today in reasons #9,000,000 and #9,000,001 why AI sucks: - Students using it to create racist imagery - That fact that AI makes it so easy to create racist imagery

There's nothing quite like when you see a student make meaning—real, personal meaning—out of a novel. This is what it's about. This is what education is all about.

Just thought to search my messages. Earliest one from my son describing something as "peak" is from October 2025, so sounds just right for a word on the upswing. (Son is in high school so probably outside the most generative slang years now.)

Important research! I totally missed the "tough" era. (Quarter?) Since my niblings aged out I'm having trouble keeping up with the reading.

Dispatches from middle school US slang: I am increasingly hearing PEAK as the go-to word for GREAT, EXCELLENT, COOL. It is displacing TOUGH, which is ousting FIRE.

Dispatches from middle school US slang: I am increasingly hearing PEAK as the go-to word for GREAT, EXCELLENT, COOL. It is displacing TOUGH, which is ousting FIRE.

April linkstack: AI ads, an AI glossary, new word games, British insults, and more. Credits: @emckean.bsky.social @mashedradish.bsky.social @caity.bsky.social @nplusonemag.com et al. fritinancy.substack.com/p/april-link...

Been getting my first emails from students (middle school) featuring ION, an internet shorthand for I DON'T.

I'm still buzzing on the fact that STRAIGHT is an old past participle form of STRETCH. Another was STRAUGHT. I really had no idea all this time! Hell yeah, English.

Etymology isn’t going to end any wars. But at least it can resolve some lexical confusions. mashedradish.com/2026/04/26/s...

I teach middle school. Even when we do active shooter drills—and yes we have to do active shooter drills like we do fire drills—even my most unruly students are dead silent, a look of fear in their eyes. Every time, the door unbarricaded, I apologize to them that we let the world be this way.

Some words related to MOON: - month - measure - meter - menstrual (menses = months in Latin) - meal (more below)

another fun fact is that the verb "magyaráz", derived from "magyar" means "to explain" so we're basically the land of mansplainers

a note though to the english world: we make far less of the family name "magyar" as the english do because it's quite a common name (35th overall according to wikipedia) in general, "nation" surnames are incredibly common, 3 of the top 10 names are "tóth", "horvát" and "németh"

If I'm not mistaken, isn't the name Péter Magyar like Péter Hungarian? MAGYAR (endonym) is the name HUNGARIANS (exonym) use for themselves and their language. MAGYAR, with Uralic roots, concerns MAN/PERSON. Via Latin, HUNGARY has ancient Turkic roots (concerning TRIBE) and influenced by HUN.

Our moon. Our muse. Our measurer—if we gaze at the etymology of the word MOON. mashedradish.com/2026/04/12/m...

Why eat noonmeat when you can have NUMMIT?!

Why eat lunch when you can have NOONMEAT?