Professor Dershowitz informs my researcher, Juliet Mohnkern, that he considers today's brief definition to be a "misapplication" of the complicated procedure that was the origin of the word: strapping a person to a board that rested on a fulcrum, like a seesaw, with the torturer on the other end able to plunge the prisoner's head into a pool of water.
The river's name is of Algonquian origin, from a word meaning "quick rising waters".
Within a text of human origin, a word has some context-independence.
Correction: This post originally mischaracterized the origin of the word "mansplaining" and has been adjusted.
The nature of the object meant that his work was already half done: It couldn't be hard to find the origin of a particle because the word itself indicated that it was part of something.
Surely just about every Tea Partier agrees with Ginsberg on the enervating effect of the liberal media: "Are you going to let our emotional life," he once wrote, "be run by Time magazine?" More seriously, the origin of the word "beat" has a connection to the Tea Partiers' sense that they are being marginalized as the country is taken away from them.
The origin of the word tobacco is a little more obscure, however.
Earlier this year, librarian and word historian Fred Shapiro at Yale Law School traced the origin of the word "software" to a 1958 article in the journal American Mathematical Monthly (Science, 19 May, p. 1169).
Pasquino is the origin of the word "pasquinade," which means a satire or lampoon posted in a public place.
'I was wondering if you know the origin of the word homeland," asked Brian Reich, a student at Columbia U., "as in 'Homeland Defense' and 'Homeland Security.' " That zeroes in on a word with a history that rivals any for resonance in the realm of politics.
