Posts Tagged ‘word with a past’
Word(s) With A Past: Left and Right as a Political Metaphor
As some of you may have noticed, here in the United States we’re coming to the end of a long, weird election season. A lot of labels have been thrown about with little reference to what they mean or why. At some point, when I had become almost numb from the rhetoric, it dawned on…
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Contrabands
Over the course of the last year I became familiar with the use of the term “contrabands” to describe escaped slaves in the American Civil War. Like many terms of the period, it seemed self-explanatory, in an ugly way. A symptom of the racism that was fundamental in the Union as well as in the…
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Word With a Past: Shoddy
In the early nineteenth century British textile manufacturers began to recycle woolen rags into a an inexpensive woolen cloth. The rags were shredded into fibers, mixed with new wood, and then spun and woven into the cloth, which was known as “shoddy”–a term that may have come from an old word meaning divide.* The process…
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