I love histories of words, and some friends gave me a great book for Christmas called Word Origins and How We Know Them by Anatoly Liberman. He also has a blog which looks like a lot of fun. It is hosted at Oxford University Press. I had no idea that university presses had blogs! As the kids would say, Duh.
I found this wonderful online etymological dictionary! Here's the entry for scapegoat. Sometimes this idea is closely connected with "shooting the messenger." Where did this phrase come from? Wikipedia tells us a version of it was used by Sophocles, and Shakespeare used it a few times as well. Tom Tomorrow gives us a contemporary update.
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One of my favorite colleagues ever had been a student of Anatoly Lieberman and had great stories about the great stories Lieberman could tell about language.
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