HAGGARD HAWKS

Just don’t call it the the Houses of Guttersnipes (Wix) 

A list of words officially deemed “unparliamentary language” by the British House of Commons proved popular on HH this week:

...so here’s a bit more about them.

The British Parliament operates under a tight and, in some instances, fairly ar...

It’s by no means unusual for words to change their meaning, often quite dramatically, as they’re passed down from decade and decade, and from century to century, through the language. Sometimes however, those changes can be quite surprising—which is the point of the new HH book, The Accidental Dicti...

Late on Monday night (or early on Tuesday morning, depending on where you’re reading this…) a brilliant word quietly crept onto the HH Twitter feed:

…and we thought you might like to know a bit more about it.

A histriomastix is indeed a theatre critic (or a “severe critic of playwrights” as ...

Full colour image of Uranus. Stop laughing. (Image credit: NASA/Wikipedia) 

Before we begin, let’s get a few things out of the way. The noxious atmosphere around Uranus could kill a man. Uranus has a circumference of 100,000 miles. Scientists are looking at a black hole near Uranus. What are those tw...

(Image credit: Flickr) 

 A few days ago, HH posted this: 

Which raised this perfectly appropriate question: 

The short answer is, yes, there is. But the long answer is much more interesting than that.

First things first: the ana– of ananym is the Ancient Greek word ana, which was variously used to...

(Image credit: Shorpy) 

Last week, we tweeted this:

It’s a great word, and given its meaning it seems plausible that it should have a much more familiar etymological cousin:

A nice idea—but unfortunately the two are unrelated. Hoolybuss is an old Cornish word, dating back to the eighteenth century...

(Image credit: NASA) 

It’s easy to forget that place names—just like surnames, first names, months of the year, and all other proper nouns—are still only words, and as such have their own histories and etymologies. We’ve mentioned quite a few of these before on the @HaggardHawks Twitter feed, from “t...