Year in, year out

Year in, year out

As promised last week, the topic of this post is the history of the word year. It is hard to tell what hampers etymological discovery more. Consider two situations. If a word is relatively late and has no cognates, language historians are usually lost. This is what happens in dealing with slang and rare (isolated) regional words. For example, someone must have coined dweeb and nerd. Though the clues to their origin are lost, intelligent guessing is encouraged. In contrast (this is the second situation)...