WordFixx

The suffix -ology is a Latin one, meaning a study or branch of knowledge. It's getting a bit abused these days, crammed onto non-Latin words to make things sound smart. I'm sorry, but they just bother me. It's like mixing apples and oranges.  I will use Google Ngrams to find when each word comes into play. Angelology - the study of angels?  I'm surprised I couldn't find a more academic word for this. MW has the first known use going back to 1663.  On my Ngram searches, the word starts to appear as far back as 1830.  There is a definitive work - Angelology by George Clayton (1851) - that does establish the age of the word and gives is a boost that it never comes back down from.  And the word is in the Universal American Dictionary as far back as 1861. Bumpology - This is a sarcastic name for "Phrenology", the disgraced old study of measuring the bumps on people's heads to determine their personality and values.  This one gets a thumbs up for being an...

Every 4th year, February gets an extra day, the 29th. This gives us a calendar year that's 365-1/4 days long. But how exactly is it a "leap year" if we make the year longer? How is that leaping over anything? It's more of a drag year, because it drags on for an extra day. This is a good example of how priorities have changed. The reason it's called a leap year is ... because it makes fixed festival days "leap" ahead one day in the week. The term goes back to Middle English. By the way, this calendar we use is called the Gregorian calendar, named after Pope Gregory XIII, who declared its use on Feb. 24, 1582. It replaced the older Julian calendar whose year was a little bit too long, and even skipped 10 days to try and get caught up. It's an interesting story. To be exact, our actual year is 365.242 days, and a leap year was defined as "every year divisible by 4 except for centenary years not divisible by 400", which does a good...