History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

Fun for Friday: Legend Etymology for Stories and Maps?

| March 14, 2025

Why do maps include something called a legend, and how does that connect to the idea of legends as stories? The etymology of “legend” is tied to the Latin word “legere,” which means “to read.” Unsurprisingly, this connects to things like legibility. It’s also connected to “lex” and “lectus,” which connects to things like lexicon […]

Fun for Friday: Etymology of Words about … Words

| January 10, 2025

Have you ever wondered about the etymology of the words we use for … words about talking? Useless Etymology has, and they wrote a brief post about the etymology of jargon, jabber, and gibberish, which are related to one another. It’s fascinating to me to see the way these words are related and how they […]

Fun for Friday: Interesting Words

| July 20, 2018

Writers thrive on words, and sometimes we want to use less common words rather than ones that everyone knows. While the words on this list may not be super uncommon, they’re still some fund words to use. There are two for every letter of the alphabet, which could also make for a fun writing challenge: […]