The word you are looking for is one of either: senicide — as in senior, senile, senectitude, senescence, senate, senator geronticide — as in gerontocracy, ˌgerontologist, gerontophilia, gerontophobe Quoth Wikipedia: Senicide or geronticide is the abandonment to death, suicide, or killing ...

Apparently, snow goblins have long been a perennial problem stretching to the very North Pole itself, which some have posited may be their ultimate origin. You can see them in full havocking mayhem in the top half of this familiar illustration: That illustration was created by an eldritch ent...

I'm Laura, a product manager at Stack Exchange. Before I get into my announcement, I just want to let you guys know that we are not changing anything regarding English Language & Usage. This post is just to keep you informed of some things we're discussing at a high level for the whole network. ...

Did биток always only exist in the context of the idiom "битком набиты", or was it a "perfectly valid noun in its own right" at some point in the past?

Is there a thumb rule for when to capitalize Родина? Or is it just a free-for-all poetic-license type of thing? For lack of a better example, Родина, еду я на Родину, Пусть кричат — уродина, А она нам нравится, Хоть и не красавица. Should it be capitalized here? And again, this i...

Are there any guidelines on using Расея over Россия? Is the former archaic or comical? Grandiloquent, ridiculous? Something else? Was it perhaps the actual official name of the country at some point in the past? As a bonus, do both come from Old Church Slavonic?

Sasha: Welcome to EL&U (and I mean that sincerely). When I was in school, there was a common refrain: there's no such thing as a stupid question. The sentiment was, if you are confused about something, you shouldn't be afraid to ask. I still believe that's true – there's no such thing as a stup...

There is nothing wrong with that, quite the opposite. In fact you can even win a nice shiny badge by reviving and answering an old question!

When I was a child in a Russian school, склизкий was sort of the textbook example of a dialectal variation. We always found it very peculiar. Dal gives this: СКОЛЬЗИТЬ, скользнуть, скалзывать; или склизнуть, склизнуть; пск. слизгать, новг. склёзить, подвигаться по гладкому, как санный полоз,...

I am sure you've come across these word pairings before: город — град смород — смрад скользкий — склизкий ворота — врата ворон — враний ворог — враг холод — хлад (cf. хладнокровный) and so on and so forth I am sure you can easily add dozens of examples yourself, off the top of your head. Now...

In the francique mosellan dialect I am speaking, there's a semi-mocking, yet not really offensive in the least, and perhaps even friendly, expression "Voulez-vous die Gruweschuh ?" — "Non, merci, mir reiche die !", used to poke fun at the French, or the French language. I have a two-part questi...

I feel like there's a problem with Stack Overflow, as the number of people prowling it increases. Each question's answers are sorted by descending score and then by descending time of posting. This means that if a person sits down and answers a question in a long, thorough way, going through eve...

What will be the alternative sentence for "Wow, you've got a very clean inbox! ". I'm creating my own mail inbox. Thanks.

In the North-East of England, where I live, the word "howwa" is used to mean "that thing". It is pronounced like "shower" and could be used in the following contexts: Can't you get it to work? Pass the howwa here. or I was trying to find the pub but it was an hour before I found the h...