Felicia Davin

animal words

Flukes and celebrity sightings

FLUKE, n. I saw whales for the first time ever this week. I also saw dolphins, and three coyotes while walking in Griffith Park, and that most Los Angeles of wild animals, a celebrity. I don’t know why I’m being coy about this: it was Natalie Portman. She’

Dead trees and live trees

RESPINGAR, v. I just wanted you all to know how far I got into Yuri Herrera’s Señales que precederán al fin del mundo before I ran into a word I needed to look up. The answer is nine words. I got nine words in. Anyway, respingar is a verb

Hey!

HEYDAY, n. This word has kind of a funny origin story. I guess people used to yell “heyda!” in the way we might yell “hurrah” or “hooray” or however you want to spell it. (Calloo, callay.) And the joyful exclamation “heyda” eventually started to sound like “heyday,” even though the

Goodest and baddest

WORST, adj. A quick note that my professional organization, Romance Writers of America, blew up in a spectacular (and distressingly racist) fashion this week. I’ve spent all week keeping up with the updates and still none of us know how things will shake out. It’s been rage-inducing, so

Hollerin'

wint @dril "This Whole Thing Smacks Of Gender," i holler as i overturn my uncle's barbeque grill and turn the 4th of July into the 4th of Shit June 16th 2012 22,126 Retweets 33,207 Likes HELLO, interj. I have spent most of this week

animal words

Sea scoundrels

ESCROW, n. and ESCROC, n. A nice thing about writing this newsletter is that every week, I get to have a moment where I go, “oh, this is it, this is the one.” I look up words every day—maybe I should start keeping a journal of words I have

guest post

Guest post at Queer Books Unbound

Today I’m over at Queer Books Unbound talking about Out of Nowhere. When I first started writing Out of Nowhere, I joked with friends that it was “that one BuzzFeed quiz about whether you’d fuck your clone, but as a book.” I probably shouldn’t advertise the book

the shore littered with stars

EAVESDROPPING, n. This word comes to us from “eavesdrop,” which originally meant water that dripped from the roof of a house—from the eaves, the part of the roof that hangs over the walls—and then came to mean the place where the water fell. In a world before gutters,

Bacon from heaven

TOCINO DE CIELO, n. This noun is a Spanish dessert, sort of like a flan, and I encountered on it a restaurant menu this week while out celebrating J’s birthday. I always tell people that restaurant menus are the hardest thing to read in any language. Sometimes people think

An excerpt of Out of Nowhere at Love in Panels

Here is a post at the fabulous review blog Love in Panels featuring at excerpt from Out of Nowhere.

Trothplighted

FIANCÉ(E), n. This word, meaning a person engaged to be married, is a French import, hence its variable spelling. In French, fiancé indicates a man engaged to be married, and fiancée a woman, but English doesn’t have grammatical gender, and non-grammatical gender is whatever we want it to

US history

Shoe against the machine

SABOTAGE, n. I caught myself repeating this word’s famous folk etymology in conversation this week—namely, that “sabotage” as in an act of deliberate obstruction/destruction comes from French sabot (clog, as in a peasant’s shoe), which is true, and that the word “sabotage” comes to us from

animal words

The inevitable sparrowfart

SPARROWFART, n. I was gonna write about another word this week—and whatever I had to say was gonna be thematically coherent with all the books I read, and also really intelligent and poignant, you know, the kind of essay that illuminates the world in a way you’ve never

number words

Counting and other cultural collisions

TWELFTY, n., adj. This newsletter has covered the weirdness of counting in French before, but did you know that counting in English also used to be weird as hell? My husband brought this to my attention recently. He discovered this word—twelfty—after buying some nails and wondering why the

Gore, goring, gored

GORE, n. and GORE, v. Neither of these words comes from Romance origins, but Spooky Season is upon us and this week’s reading had me thinking about horror. I was wondering if English’s verb meaning “to pierce with a horn or a weapon” was connected to English’s

animal words

Not all rats are kings

RAT KING, n. This newsletter has discussed etymologies related to foxes, butterflies, lobsters, and dogs, and this week, it’s all about rats—or rather, rat kings. A rat king, in case you are blessed not to know this, is a bunch of rats knotted together by their tails or

animal words

Curs and handkerchiefs

HANDKERCHIEF, n. This word has nothing to do with anything in this newsletter, but it’s just delightful to me. “Kerchief” is from the French couvre-chef, literally cover-head. Like in “curfew,” couvre-feu or cover-fire, couvre reduces down to “ker/cur.” And then “hand” is straight-up Old English, just tacked on

animal words

They know the secrets of the sea and do not bark

LOBSTER, n. Okay, since the etymology for “butterfly” was so rewarding, I wanted to check out some other animal words. For “lobster,” Bon Appétit is on the case and I’m just gonna share a chunk of their article because it’s wonderful: …the Ancient Romans went for concision: their

Peach preserves

IMPEACH, v. If you look up “impeach” in a modern English-French dictionary, you’ll be given a translation along the lines of “lancer une procédure d’impeachment contre” (to start a process of impeachment against) because the concept of “impeachment” that’s in the news right now is specific to

animal words

Butter gremlins

Before I get into words & books this week, I want you all to know that my beloved says “I LOVE IT, IT’S IN THE NEWSLETTER, DONE” whenever I mention an interesting word. You have to imagine those phrases as they would be spoken in this Key & Peele

And I cannot stress this enough

STRESS, n. In English, this word means either “pressure or tension exerted on an object” (in physics) or “mental or emotional tension resulting from life’s bullshit being way too much for you to handle” (in pretty much everything else). It’s a shortening of distress, which English gets from

Insolent and obsolete

SOLOIR, v. This Old French verb means “to be accustomed to, to usually do” or “to be wont to” if you feel real fancy. Soloir no longer exists in modern French, but you can still see its relatives all over the place. Modern Spanish and Italian retain soler and solere,

the naming of things

FALLOPIAN, adj. This word, which only exists in the term “Fallopian tube(s)” as far as I know, comes to us from the 16th-century Italian anatomist Gabriello Fallopio, who first described the tubes that carry eggs from the ovaries into the uterus. Not a particularly exciting word, except that it’

French literature

Fo(u)nt of wisdom or whatever

FONT, n. This word came up in conversation this week, as in a set of typographical characters. I thought maybe it was related to fount/fountain, and that the semantic connection was inkwells and liquids, but in fact, “font”—whether you mean a set of printing press characters or a

French history

Gardens and cemeteries

NAPOLÉON, n. Here’s a word with all sorts of meanings, very different in French and English. If you say “napoleon,” you might be talking about * Napoléon B(u)onaparte, AKA Napoléon, AKA Napoléon le Grand, AKA Boney,* a Corsican soldier who rose up in the French military to become