Word With a Past
Contrabands
Over the course of the last year I became familiar with the use of the term “contrabands” to describe escaped slaves in the American Civil War. Like many terms of the period, it seemed self-explanatory, in an ugly way. A symptom of the racism that was fundamental in the Union as well as in the…
Read More
Word With a Past: Shoddy
In the early nineteenth century British textile manufacturers began to recycle woolen rags into a an inexpensive woolen cloth. The rags were shredded into fibers, mixed with new wood, and then spun and woven into the cloth, which was known as “shoddy”–a term that may have come from an old word meaning divide.* The process…
Read More
Word With A Past: Pyrrhic Victory
Pyrrhus (319 to 272 BCE), king of the Greek city-state Epirus, was a second cousin of Alexander the Great. He earned a reputation as a successful general in the political chaos of the successor kingdoms that arose from the ruins of his famous cousin’s empire. A hundred years after Pyrrhus’s death, Hannibal, famous for crossing…
Read More