The Latin root of “read” — lego, legere — means both “to read” and “to choose.” This makes me think about how every act of reading already involves selection and leaving things out.

OE næs "point of land running into the sea"; obsolete except in place names

OE mor "morass, swamp" (i.e. a marsh, a tract of soft wet land) and fenn "mud, mire, dirt; fen, marsh, moor,"

from OE "child, son, descendant"

The definition of kairos is "a propitious moment for decision or action," but I was wondering if the etymology would yield anything interesting. Nope.

Etymology: "1930s: Greek, literally ‘opportunity.’"

The definition of heuristic is roughly "allowing someone to learn something for themselves" but I was interested in the etymology.

Apparently, it's "early 19th century: formed irregularly from Greek heuriskein ‘find.’" I wonder if this is where we get the phrase "to find out."

def. A work of art. The complete body of an artist's work.

etymology from the late 19th century: French, literally ‘work.’

Definition: "grammar, rhetoric, and logic," the first three of the seven liberal arts in the Middle Ages, considered initiatory and foundational to the other four: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music.

Etymology: From Latin "trivium," tri (three) + via (road); a place where three roads meet.

Wikipedia has it broken down as "grammar, logic, and rhetoric" = "input, process, and output." This is pretty consistent with Enlightenment thinking that logic is the process and rhetoric is the presentation. I'm interested in how this gets appropriated to a trivium of "syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics."

Ah, yes, "grist for his mill," that phrase we all know!

I was really thrown by this phrase, so I thought others might find this helpful:

If you say that something is grist to the mill, you mean that it is useful for a particular purpose or helps support someone's point of view.

def. anything that can be turned to profit or advantage

Etymology notes: Grist is the corn that is brought to a mill to be ground into flour. In the days when farmers took 'grist to the mill' the phrase would have been used literally to denote produce that was a source of profit.

def.

ˈdādəm,ˈdadəm/ noun 1. a piece of information. 2. a fixed starting point of a scale or operation.

I thought the etymology was interesting, too: From the Latin dare (to give). The Latin datum (something given), brings us to the mid 18th century usage of datum (a given).

Um, what?! I had no idea, until this very moment, that heigh-ho was an actual word and not a nonsense-sound for the Seven Dwarves to sing.

Def. used typically to express boredom, weariness, or sadness or sometimes as a cry of encouragement

Etymology: The phrase "Heigh-Ho" was first recorded in 1553 and is defined as an expression of "yawning, sighing, languor, weariness, disappointment". Eventually, it blended meanings with the similarly spelled "hey-ho".

def. ˈpädərz ˌfēld/ noun historical "a burial place for paupers and strangers."

I then thought that "Potter's Field" might be a corruption of "pauper's field," but it turns out the etymology is "from the mention in Matthew 27:7 of the purchase of a potter's field for use as a graveyard," according to Merriam-Webster.

Etymology?