547: Posh Jun 7, 2016

Folk-etymology, or made-up etymology often involves stories that do not have any hard evidence to support it, but are logical enough to fly under the radar sometimes. The exact derivation of 'posh' is unknown and this leaves room for people to swoop in and supply their own. Depending upon where one searches, it is possible to find something saying that 'posh' is an acronym for "port out starboard home", the story being that this denotes the use of the preferable accommodations sailing back and forth England to India as to escape the heat of the sun. Nevertheless, however fun the story is, nothing backs it up as true.

546: frankfurter versus wiener Jun 6, 2016

Is a hotdog a frankfurter or a wiener? The answer is that both are correct, but the choice depends upon where one and one's associates hail from in the Deutschraum. Austrians would likely say that it was invented in Austria, and call it a wiener, while those from Germany, would likely say 'frankfurter'. The reason is that 'wiener' is the German equivalent of 'Viennese' and 'frankfurter' is the demonym for Frankfurt, and often, meats were named after the cities where they were made, such as bologna. 

545: albany and scotland Jun 5, 2016

'Albany' is a city in many places, there are 22 (once 23) in the United States alone, and 10 more worldwide, named after the Duke of Albany in Scotland. The word comes from 'Alba' which is the Gaelic word for Scotland. The word 'Scotland' itself came through Old English plural 'Scottas' from Latin, 'Scottus' though no one is quite sure why. It is pretty clear that after the naming of Germany, Wales, Scotland and a few other places fairly arbitrarily that the Romans preferred their own names to those native to Northern Europe.

544: Dominant Language of South America Jun 4, 2016

What is the dominant language of South America‽ If one were to measure that in the number of countries with a common official language, the dominant language would be Spanish, as there are 9 in South America, and also 3 in the Caribbean, and 6 in Central America. If one were to measure by number of speakers, the dominant language of South America would be Portuguese, as Brazil has a higher number of people speaking its native language than the total of the countries on rest of that continent. There are also English, Dutch, and French-speaking countries, along with large populations of those speaking Amerind languages, but not enough to make any a dominant language of the continent.

543: miami Jun 3, 2016

What is now the U.S. state of Florida was formerly a Spanish colony, and still has a culture that is heavily influenced by Latin-America and the Caribbean. Nevertheless, 'Miami' comes not from Spanish, but from French who used the word from Algonquin. The Miami were a separate group from the Algonquins, but their languages belongs to the Algonuin-subgroup of Algic family, and the word was the same for both groups.

542: Wars of the Roses Jun 2, 2016

The Wars of the Roses, often mistakenly referred to as "The War of the Roses" were a series of skirmishes in England between 1455 to 1485 as the House of Lancaster and the House of York both vied for power. The name of the war is set on the badges used by the two sides: those who wore red roses stood for the Lancastrians and those who wore white rose stood for the Yorkists.

541: marshmallow Jun 1, 2016

Marshmallows: part of the quintessential American summer-food. The word, however, is much older than the s'mores-tradition. The word comes from the Old English 'mersc-mealwe', meaning 'marsh' and mallow, and is the same root for the word 'mauve' also made from a mallow. Although the food may be unhealthy to eat in large amounts, the scientific name comes from the Greek, 'althein' meaning "to heal".

540: talent May 31, 2016

Talent is something one is born either having or not, and though it can make someone very rich, to make a living is a great deal of work. This is a belief universally acknowledged, as the word 'talent' in Old English as "talente" used as a unit for measuring weight, derived from the Latin "talentum" meaning ‘weight, sum of money’. The current meaning is a reference to the Latin Bible's "parable of the talents" (Matt. 25:14–30).

539: venezuela May 30, 2016

Venezuela comes from the Spanish diminutive meaning 'little Venice'. The Spanish colonizers noticed the way that the Venezuelans built their houses upon stilts over water, and likened that to the notable city, with the Italian name, Venezia.

538: again versus against May 29, 2016

Spelling in English may seem arbitrary and nonsensical, but it is common to find that words with similar spellings, even without similar meanings today, may be closely related. The preposition 'against' was formed in Middle English from the adverb 'again' and the suffix '-s' which is the genitive ending that still appears in "-'s" such as "Robert's dog" to show possession, and from there, the '-t' was added to mimic superlatives. This same process occurred in the evolution of among and amongst. The steps may be fairly straightforward, but the connection between 'again' and 'against' is not very clear necessarily. 'Again' actually changed meaning over time from the original Old English, 'ongēan, ongægn' which meant something similar to ‘opposite’.

537 biology and zoology May 28, 2016

People have probably heard that biology is "the study of life". Although this is close to the truth, it misses the mark. 'Bio' comes from the Greek word, 'bios' means "human life" or "course of (human) life’. Until recently, a biologist would have only have been thought or expected to study humans, though now the sense has been extended to ‘organic life’. What really means 'life' in Greek is 'zōē' and is related to 'zoology' from the word for animals, 'zōion'.

536: collar versus column May 27, 2016

If a column holds up a building, what holds up a head?
The Latin word for 'neck' is 'collum' which translates into 'collar' and it is the reason that people talk about collar-bones and shirt-collars which happen to sit on one's neck. Going back to the initial question, some believe that it is related to 'column', which makes some phonological and semantic sense.

535: Cyprian versus Cypriot May 26, 2016

When referring to someone from the country, Cyprus, the correct demonym is 'Cypriot'. If, by mistake, one were to write, 'Cyprian' a spell-checking program would not catch the error, for it is also a word. Unfortunately, the meaning of 'Cyprian' is 'prostitute'. Before the early 19th century these words were usually interchangeable, however, canonically Aphrodite was born on Cyprus, so people began to refer the story of the goddess of love euphemistically when talking about prostitutes. 

534: by jove May 25, 2016

The king-god of the Romans, was Jupiter. Much like the common exclamation, "oh my God", or 'by God", "by Jove" is ultimately a religious reference. Although 'Jupiter' or 'iupiter' was the name the most powerful God, Latin declines its nouns depending on the function in the sentence. 'Jupiter' is used for the subject, but after that, the stem becomes 'jov-', for example the genitive form ("of Jupiter")–used to signify possession–was 'jovis'. The preposition, 'by' changes the syntax of the proper noun into ablative case which uses the '-e'-ending, so people would have to use the form 'jove'.

533: aquarium May 24, 2016

Archeologists, upon seeing an artifact, could paint pictures about the history of the past, but only with context. Otherwise, it is just an object with little value in and of itself. Etymology follows that same path. To know that 'aquarium' comes from the Latin meaning 'of water' tells little. Though aquaria of marble have been kept under the beds of those thinking back to ancient Rome, the first public aquarium opened in London in 1853, called "The Fish House". It was only in 1854, in "The Aquarium" by Philip Henry Gosse, millennia after the Romans or Chinese, when the word 'aquarium' was used instead of the common 'aquatic vivarium'. From this point, aquaria boomed in popularity, and so did the word.

532: astronomy versus Astrology May 23, 2016

Of the similar words 'astronomy' and 'astrology', one was created just to mean 'study of stars' but be distinct from the other. 'Astrology', the older of the two, denotes the practice of 'astronomy', in that it was used for predicting natural happenings and other such things, but it later took the meaning of the use of the stars to predict human-behavior and other more spiritual things. Such that the exact science may be more distinct from the other practices, people came up with 'astronomy' which comes from the Greek for ‘star-arranging’.

531: Letter-Grades May 22, 2016

The letter-grading system goes A, B, C, D for the passing grades in descending order, but there is no E anymore; it skips to F. The rationale is that none of the first four letters are abbreviations for words: only a representation of grade-intervals, while the F stands for 'failure'.

530: annoy and odious May 21, 2016

The word 'annoy' has over time retained its original meaning with only slight differences in connotation. In Middle English the word meant ‘be hateful to’, or sometimes 'attack repeatedly' usually in reference to skirmishes and raids. As may be expected from Middle English-words, it came from the Old French 'anoier' (verb). The original base was the Latin, 'odio' from the phrase "mihi in odio est" meaning ‘it is hateful to me’. The Latin root may not sound at all like the French, but the connection to a hard '-d' and an 'n' would be clear to anyone with a cold. Despite the nasalization in French of certain sounds, 'odious' came to English from the same word in Latin via French as well.

529: Non-Rhyming Words May 20, 2016

Theoretically, there are infinite possible words that can be produced from a collection of relatively few phonemes, in the same way infinite numbers can be formed by adding other numbers. Often, however, there are trends in the phonological structures of different words, which, simply put, produces a rhyme. Some words don't fall into these such trends, for instance 'month', 'orange', 'silver' or 'purple'*.

*This information has been corrected here.

528: (Spelling) Bee May 19, 2016

Spelling-bees are a competition on knowing words, yet many people don't understand the words in the name itself. A 'bee' is an old way of saying 'community-gathering' usually for a single purpose. The idiom comes from the way that the insect, bees, act socially in a colony to perform tasks for the greater good. The term is rarely used now, but some peoples still use this phrase, such as the Amish who have knitting-bees, for example.