Author: Mary

The word muscle comes from the Latin musculus, which means little mouse. But why? It’s because the rippling movement of certain muscles under the skin was...

Sometimes I worry that I’ll describe the origin of a word incorrectly because I get my Greek and Latin roots confused. At this distance, it’s easy t...

This is the third and final post in a series on some of the most glorious plant families of the summer garden and orchard. Part 1 covered cucurbits, and part 2 ...

A surprising number of chemical elements are named for places. (Well, it surprised me, anyway.) Many of the elements that have been identified since the late 18...

Welcome to part 2 in a series of posts about the late summer garden harvest. (Part 1, on the cucurbits, is here; part 3, on the drupes, is here.) Today we’...

Given that the Mars rover Curiosity is in the news (it did not find methane in the planet’s atmosphere, contrary to earlier reports), this seems like a go...

My last post was about the link between the words melancholy and choler, which are based on the Greek word for bile. Melancholy and choler were associated with ...

You don’t see the string chol in too many words except for fairly specialized terms in biochemistry or medicine, so I had to wonder whether there’s ...

This is perhaps the best time of year to visit the Farmers Market, with the tables and baskets full of tomatoes, red peppers, and colorful squash gleaming in th...

Here in the middle of this bafflingly quiet Atlantic hurricane season, I thought I’d look at the words hurricane and typhoon. Both words refer to the same...