The first computer mouse (1964)   The English word mouse has been around longer than the English language has.   Its origin is in the Proto-Germanic word m ū s , which is also a word for the rodent.   It gave rise to the Old English mous and mowse , the German Maus , and the Dutch muis .   The reason the word has the peculiar plural form of mice is due to a process known as cheshirization, where a change in the way certain sounds in a language change, but an obsolete phonological distinction gets reclassified as a new form.   To make this simpler, mice is descended from the Proto-Germanic m ūsiz, which is the form of the nominative and vocative declensions of m ūs .   You need not know what a declension is, except that the vocative declension no longer exists in English (not as a distinct, marked form, at least).   The only way a declension changes the modern English word mouse is when we use the possessive declension mouse’s .   Declensions are something you n

The United States Capitol Building, Capitol Hill, Washington, DC. A common typo, particularly among Americans, comes from confusing capital and capitol.  It’s an easy mistake to make, since both words mean something similar, and both are pronounced exactly the same.  But there’s a crucial difference, and one that means more in America than it does in other English-speaking countries. The word capital is an indirect descendant of the Latin word caput, which means head.  Its descent from Latin is indirect because it came to English, like so many words, from French.  Capitale was an Old French word that entered English sometime around the 13th century.  Its original meaning was “pertaining to the head”.  By the 15th century, the word had taken on the meaning “of chief importance”, and by the 18th century it came to mean “first rate” or “excellent”.  Around the early 16th century, the term capital crime came into use, meaning basically what it means today: a “deadly” or “mortal” c

Sheet music for Calvin Coolidge’s 1924 presidential campaign song, “Keep Cool with Coolidge” In the summer of 1924, Calvin Coolidge was finishing his first year as president.  He ascended to the White House after the untimely death of President Warren Harding the previous August.  Coolidge is remembered by most historians as a president who didn’t do a whole lot while in office, who did not care to talk to the press, and who preferred to let others do the heavy lifting of government.  The eager young Herbert Hoover was always willing to take on whatever job the president would ask him to do, and President Coolidge allowed it, despite his personal feelings toward Hoover not being particularly warm. One phrase that is associated with President Coolidge is “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”  It’s not hard to see where he was coming from.  Coolidge’s time in office saw a prosperous economy heat up.  The Roaring 20s really roared while he was in the White House.  The most one c

Seasons greetings from Caspar Milquetoast Mild and soothing, milk toast is a comfort food from way back.  In the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries, it was a common breakfast dish.  It’s a simple recipe: toasted bread in warm milk, usually with sugar and/or butter added.  For a little more flavor, you could add salt, raisins, pepper, paprika, cinnamon, cocoa, maple syrup, cumin, fruit… whatever you had lying around the kitchen.  Because it was considered such a mild, soothing dish, it was often recommended to convalescents by doctors as a food that would avoid upsetting their patients’ constitutions. Milk toast is a recipe that Americans borrowed from Europe, where varieties of this simple dish are found all over, probably introduced by immigrants and tinkered with by cooks all over the country.  It doesn’t have to be bland, but it has long had that reputation. Perhaps because of that reputation, fairly or unfairly, this largely forgotten comfort food made i