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An American Navy officer edited a maritime encyclopedia. He wasn’t home when it was published because he was shipwrecked alongside then-midshipman John Lejeune and during his homecoming party, Rudyard Kipling claimed to have fallen in love with him. His encyclopedia is great.

Old English had the same word for a spy and a mirror: sċēawere, or ‘watcher’.

Learning the hard way that if you lock yourself in to revise a book manuscript for a week, you start to go slightly batty?

Slang for “soldier” in the late 1700s was “brother of the blade.”

I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

The Anglo-Saxons could’ve called a hunting dog something normal, but instead they said wælhwelp or ‘slaughter-pup’.

After seven days and seventy hours of work, I have finished red-penning and revising my book manuscript.

Both ‘libel’ & ‘slander’ refer to defamation and are often confused for each other. ‘Libel’ is a written/published statement. 'L' for 'letters.' ‘Slander’ is for spoken. 'S' for 'spoken.' ‘Label’ & ‘slender’ are different words and are rarely confused for each other.

People in the military latch on to weird phrases

Four years ago, I taught an AI to write a U.S. National Security Strategy. (It did a pretty good job!) We are back in NSS season and I wonder how much better AI would do at this today… War on the Rocks warontherocks.com/2021/04/strate…

I’m not sure what was going on in the 16th-century imagination, but this is at least a reminder that ‘to steal someone’s thunder’ originated with an event in 1709, when one theatre company nicked a thunder-making machine from another to use in their own play, leading the wounded

Solid episode by U.S. Army Combined Arms Doctrine Directorate

The word “eucatastrophe” was coined by Tolkien. He defined it as “the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears, which I argue is the highest function of fairy-stories to produce.” In Old English you might use fērwundor, or “sudden wonder.”

anxiolytic | adjective | relieving anxiety We hope this weekend is anxiolytic for you.

My favorite military tradition is asking someone what an acronym means right after they use it, and they don’t know what it means.

‘Squirrelled,’ as in “squirrelled away,” can be pronounced “SKWERLD.” ‘Squirrelled’ has 11 letters, making it the longest one-syllable word in English.

Why were British military musicians' uniforms so ostentatious in the 1800s? Apparently, musicians were going straight to the alehouses after getting off duty, still in uniform. This wore out their uniforms too quickly and there was no money set aside to replace them. So a

In 1959, the U.S. Coast Guard bombed a couple of icebergs.

In ancient Rome, a governor or general could earn the OBSIDIONAL CROWN, if "by their skill and exertions, either held out, or caused the siege to be raised of any town belonging to the republic." The crown was made from grass harvested from the location of the broken siege.