The world's toughest language game gets even tougher.
May 2, 2025
This week¡¯s theme
Words that aren¡¯t what they appear to be
This week¡¯s words
Bartholomew Fair (1807)
Etching: Thomas Rowlandson, after John Nixon
A.Word.A.Day
with Anu Garg
piepowder
PRONUNCIATION:
(PY-pow-duhr)
MEANING:
noun: A traveler, especially a traveling merchant.
ETYMOLOGY:
From Old French pie (foot) + poudre (powder, dust). Earliest documented
use: 1436.
NOTES:
Back in the pre-sneaker, pre-sidewalk, pre-horseless-carriage era,
earned their name the hard way: one dusty footstep at a time.
The term piepowder literally means dusty-foot, a poetic nod to the grime
that clung to merchants as they wandered from fair to fair, hawking wares
and dodging pickpockets.
Itinerant merchants were the original pop-up shops. Because disputes over
goods, weights, and prices were inevitable, special Courts of Piepowders
were held on the spot to mete out justice, fairground-style. Think Judge
Judy, but with more livestock and fewer microphones.
USAGE:
¡°I had the rogues up at the court of piepowder, and they will harm no
more peaceful traders.¡±
Arthur Conan Doyle; The White Company; Smith, Elder & Co.; 1891.
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
Man can be the most affectionate and altruistic of creatures, yet he's
potentially more vicious than any other. He is the only one who can be
persuaded to hate millions of his own kind whom he has never seen and to
kill as many as he can lay his hands on in the name of his tribe or his
God. -Benjamin Spock, pediatrician and author (2 May 1903-1998)
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