word histories

‘dead and never called me mother’: meaning and origin

27th Aug 2020.Reading time 16 minutes.

used to characterise melodrama—from the words said over her dead child by Lady Isabel in East Lynne (1874), T. A. Palmer’s stage play adapted from the 1861 novel by the English author Mrs. Henry Wood (Ellen Price)

the meaning of ‘wuthering’ in ‘Wuthering Heights’

26th Aug 2017.Reading time 7 minutes.

In the name of the farmhouse, ‘wuthering’ is a “provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather.”