Felicia Davin

animal words

Pigeonries

PIGEONHOLE, n., v. Pigeons have come up a lot lately in my life, so I’ve been thinking about related words. Here is a thing I just learned from my friend, Elia Winters, who is writing a historical romance about the US Army Pigeon Service in World War II: pigeons

art history

Heat and steam

CALORIFÈRE, n. This is an old-timey French word that means “heater,” which I was able to guess because I married a chemist who sometimes says words like “calorimeter”—a device that measures heat in chemical reactions—and also because “calor/e” is Latin/Spanish/Italian for heat. I have nothing

plant words

Scape, landscape, escape

SCAPE, n. In my part of the world (the northeastern United States), late spring and early summer is the season to eat garlic scapes, which are the long, curly stems of the plant. They often grow in these beautiful, twisty loops, but their name’s etymological path into English is

animal words

Head first

CHIPMUNK, n. In case you don’t live in an area of North America or Siberia where these small mammals, genus Tamias, can be found, here is a picture of Tamias striatus, the Eastern chipmunk. These cute little rodents are all over my yard and sometimes they make a kind

expressions

Jackpot

JACKPOT, n. I mostly associate this noun with winning the lottery—hitting the jackpot—but it actually comes from poker, which isn’t too surprising. It originally referred to a pot, or a collective pool of money, into which players would contribute until one of them could open the betting

place names

Land of the setting sun

EUROPE, n. I’ve never really thought about this word even though I’ve said it a lot. What brought me to the dictionary entry was my recent work on a collaborative writing project set in a fantasy world. My co-authors pointed out that our made-up continent needed a name,

food words

Mastication

MASTIC, n. We had mastic candy from Turkey in our house this week. (This newsletter is not #sponcon, but the candy came to us through our Universal Yums subscription, which is incidentally also the reason licorice was on my mind a few weeks ago.) I had never encountered mastic before,

animal words

Froglets

FROG, n. We have seen several frogs while out in nature this week, and my beloved is in “frog mode” (this means, according to him, caring exclusively about frogs), so clearly I had to look up “frog” in the dictionary. “Frog” comes from Old English “frogga,” which is a form

plant words

Spiny things

ECHINACEA, n. Today my beloved was planting purple coneflower, Echinacea purpurea, a plant native to North America, sometimes used in medicine, that looks like this: Echinacea, a word that no longer looks real to me after the number of times I have typed it into Google, comes from the Greek

food words

Garlic and wine

VINDALOO, n. This word is far outside my expertise, but I looked it up this week because I was watching Cobra Kai on Netflix, which is a goofy show about punching and how being the protagonist of an 80s high school movie leaves you with emotional scars, and on that

food words

Ricolisse

LICORICE, n. This is the name of a plant whose roots can be dried and use to flavor food. It comes from a Greek term meaning “sweet root,” glykyrrhiza, which became “liquiritia” by the time Late Latin speakers got a hold of it. The way we spell it in English

art history

Making it look easy

SPREZZATURA, n. I love this word and think about it all the time. It comes from Italian, specifically from Baldassare Castiglione’s 1528 Il Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier), a Renaissance text composed of dialogues about what constitutes the ideal courtier and what kind of skills that person should

Robotnik

ROBOT, n. I wish I was writing about this word at a moment when I was reading books about robots, because I love it when these newsletters cohere and also I really want to read the sequels to this, but I am a chaotic and easily distracted creature. So what

Word Suitcase will return on April 11

Sorry for missing last Sunday! I overestimated my ability to plan a Zoom seder and also write a newsletter. I’m also going to take Sunday, April 4 off—just have one too many projects happening right now. I will write again on Sunday, April 11. Until then, if you

food words

Joints and popsicles

Since I left Substack this week, I was thinking about expressions people use when they’re leaving a place, and I landed on “let’s blow this popsicle stand” as a particularly puzzling one. Why does “blow” mean “leave”? Where are all these popsicle stands and why are people leaving

Tournament of Books

I am taking this week off from Word Suitcase, but if you want to read something I wrote, I did participate in the Tournament of Books as a judge. I was assigned Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom and Quan Barry’s We Ride Upon Sticks, two very different novels, and

guest post

I'm a judge in the Tournament of Books

I was invited to participate in the 2021 Tournament of Books, which was such a thrill. I read Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom and Quan Barry’s We Ride Upon Sticks, and you can read my thoughts about them here.

Chits and ingénues

CHIT, n. / INGÉNUE, n. The usual form of this newsletter requires me to put these words at the beginning, but you’ll have to excuse me, I’m taking the long way around to their definitions and etymologies. This week’s reading in small-r romance and Capital-R Romance is the

plant words

Pith

PITHY, adj. Sometimes questions have easy answers. Today in my house, we wondered if “pithy,” as in “concise, meaningful,” is related to “pith,” as in the white stuff under the peel of a citrus fruit, and the answer is yes. “Pith” goes all the way back to Old English (that’

art history

Furbelows and dandies

FURBELOW, n. I’ve been reading Valerie Steele’s Paris Fashion: A Cultural History and J. A. Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Du Dandysme et de G. Brummell (usually called The Anatomy of Dandyism in English) as research for the romance novel I’m writing that is set in nineteenth-century Paris,

body or sex words

Let's have a bouba

BOOBS, n. This term for breasts shows up in print in US English for the first time in 1929, which means people were saying it before that. “Boobies” is older than just plain “boobs,” and it’s a variation on “bubbies,” which goes all the way back to the 1600s

Low dudgeon

DUDGEON, n. If you read fiction from or set in the nineteenth century, sometimes you encounter a character “in high dudgeon,” where “dudgeon” means anger, indignation, resentment, displeasure. I thought about using this word in my draft this week, but got stuck on the question of whether one has to

Horse, soap, space opera

SPACE OPERA, n. Last night in my household we had a discussion of what exactly constitutes the subgenre of science fiction called “space opera.” As with all genre definitions, the answer will change depending on who you ask and what works you consider. But whatever boundaries we draw around “space

US history

Filibuster war

FILIBUSTER, n., v. This is an ultra-specific US politics word that means, in contemporary usage, to talk an issue to death in the Senate (or, in its noun form, the long speech that prevents the vote). That practice dates from the 1830s, according to historian Heather Cox Richardson’s January

'Twas glibberig

GLIB, adj. This adjective has a lot more possible definitions that I thought! If you’d asked me what it meant a few days ago, before I started poking through search results, I think I would have said “superficial” or maybe “flippant.” My results bear that out, but there’s