This is a map of the wheel-ruts of modern English. Etymologies are not definitions; they’re explanations of what our words meant and how they sounded 600 or 2,000 years ago.
The dates beside a word indicate the earliest year for which there is a surviving written record of that word (in English, unless otherwise indicated). This should be taken as approximate, especially before about 1700, since a word may have been used in conversation for hundreds of years before it turns up in a manuscript that has had the good fortune to survive the centuries.
from the Online Etymology Dictionary
I’m going on vacation for a week, so there won’t be any posts until July 11. How about some etymology before we go? Did you know that ‘cool cash’ is one of the oldest uses of ‘cool,’ dating from the 1700s? Or that ‘groovy‘ is related to grave and ditch, and took on its slang sense in the 1930s, like ‘cool’? Yet another debt we owe Black Jazz. Hip, by the way, “probably a variant of hep” (as in cool or groovy) is as old as the airplane.
