Vestigial Words

I enjoy the rich history of English, and vast lexicon that it has from the wide range of languages it's borrowed from and the hundreds of years it has had to grow and evolve. But with evolution, we retain traces of our origins. In fact, we have vestigial words, much the same that we have vestigial structures in our own bodies. There are some words that only exist in old phrases that we have retained, even though the word is long dead. The funny thing (and by funny, I mean really annoying) is that most people don't know about the history of the word, so when they use the phrase, they often use it wrong.

For example, we have the phrase "champing at the bit". I don't know if I've ever heard somebody actually say the phrase correctly. Everybody says "chomping". It makes sense to some degree, since that's actually a word in use. In fact, champing and chomping are nearly the same thing. The problem is that chomping at the bit isn't a phrase. (Hell, even fewer people know what the phrase literally means.)

Another vestigial word is "jack". Yes, it's a word spoken almost every day, and it's usually used correctly, but not in the phrase "jack-of-all-trades". Notice that "jack" is not capitalized. That's because it's not a name; it's a title (or at least a description). Think about a deck of cards - the third face card is the jack, not Jack. Although we usually use the phrase correctly, we live in the age of political correctness, so some dumbass decided that a woman who knows a little bit about a lot of things is a Jane-of-all-trades, and now we have a problem.

I think vestigial words are pretty interesting, mostly in that they are a link to the past. I also find it curious that a word can fall out of usage, but a phrase that uses it will remain. I don't usually mind their use, either. But if you find a word or phrase where "I don't know how to define it, but I know how to use it in a sentence", then look it up. You can find out more about your language and it will mean more to you when reading and writing it.