Building the Online Etymology Dictionary, with Doug Harper

1150. This week, we look at "impact" as a verb and why it's a pet peeve for so many editors and readers. Then, we look at the linguistic shift between sympathy and empathy, exploring how "sympathy" began to sound patronizing and how "empathy" expanded to fill the gap.

1149. This week, we look at the life and legacy of Samuel Johnson, the man behind the 1755 Dictionary of the English Language. We talk with John Overholt, curator at Harvard’s Houghton Library, about Johnson's eclectic career. We also look at what it’s like to manage a collection of 4,000 rare books and why even the most "unremarkable" items deserve a home in a library.

1148. This week, we look at penny idioms that are still "legal tender" in our language even as the U.S. penny is retired. We look at the history of phrases like "a bad penny" and "penny wise and pound foolish." Then, we look at the linguistic history of procrastination, explaining how human nature changed words like "soon," "anon," and "presently" from meaning "at once" to "in a little while."

1147. In this bonus segment that originally ran in October, we look at the fascinating history of the "new letters" of the alphabet — V, W, X, Y, and Z. Danny Bate explains why T was the original end of the alphabet and how letters were added by the Greeks and Romans. We also look at the origin of the letter Y, which was originally a vowel, and the two historical reasons we call the final letter “zee” or “zed.”

1146. This week, we look at the history of Braille, from the tragic accident that inspired Louis Braille's six-dot system to the "War of the Dots"—a decades-long conflict over competing reading standards in the U.S. Then, we look at the origin of the phrase "pitch black," revealing how the intensifier "pitch" refers to an ancient, dark wood tar and how the word traces its roots back to Old English.