Word With a Past
From the Archives – Word with a Past: Two Bits
Somehow this piece from 2013 seems appropriate post-Super Bowl. (New stories are piling up waiting to be written. Soon, I promise.) One of the favorite cheers for my junior high school’s football team went “Two bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar, all for our team stand up and holler.” It made no sense to…
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From the Archives: Word with a Past – Silhouette
I’m poking around in the long eighteenth century these days and stumbling across lots of surprising tidbits. Take silhouettes. I had long known that charming likenesses cut from black cardstock became a popular and affordable alternative to oil portraits in the mid-eighteenth century. To the extent that I thought about the word at all, I…
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From the Archives: Word With a Past: Mausoleum
Among other things, I’m currently working on the story of Artemisia II, the widowed queen in the story below. I’m ashamed to realized that I did not mention her by name: my own small contribution to erasing women from history. (I’ve corrected that in this re-run.) While we don’t know a great deal about Queen…
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