The first Master of the Ceremonies was hired in 1603 to stop diplomatic incidents at the English court. Four hundred years later, the job's the same: make everyone else look good. Here's how.

In ancient Greek, a hypocrite was simply an actor. English kept the word and changed the job description. Here's what that tells leaders who think they need to play a part.

Noah Webster gave America color, center and defense, and very nearly gave it tung, wimmin and masheen. But two spellings usually blamed on him aren’t his at all, and one of them is still used at Oxford.

In 1535, two young men told Jacques Cartier the way to their kanata, their village. He thought it was a name. Today that village covers almost ten million square kilometres, and it narrowly avoided being renamed Efisga.

Yoda’s word order is one of the rarest on Earth, and the few languages that use it cluster in the Amazon. But Yoda isn’t really speaking an exotic grammar. He’s doing something English speakers do every day, just constantly.

In tennis, love means zero. It’s often credited to the French word for egg, but there’s no evidence for that. The real origin is a 17th-century bet, and it explains why English still treats anything you do for love as worth nothing.

Ms wasn’t invented in the 1970s. It was proposed in 1901, and its two siblings were once the very same word.

The continent’s name comes from a Latin word for the south wind, a land nobody had seen, and a Spanish explorer’s pun on the Austrian royal family.

Spam is the only word I know that went from a pantry to a comedy sketch to every email server on earth, without ever really changing what it meant.

In early 2020, people waited anxiously for the World Health Organization to say one word. It turned out to be a very old word, and a very democratic one.

The word is barely a century old. The thing it describes has been annoying people since at least the Middle Ages, and one medieval poet put Jesus on record against it.