You don't see a meteorite used in conjunction with too many other specific words in which it has changed its meaning.
In French, the word restore means the same thing in the sense to replace or repair,
but it also means something else as a reflexive verb.
It means to refresh or to gain nourishment through food, to eat.
Coming up on Word Matters.
Meteors fall, so why are their meteoric rises?
And the pair of words restaurant and restaurateur.
I'm Emily Brewster and Word Matters is produced by Merriam-Webster in collaboration with New England Public Media.
On each episode, Merriam-Webster editors Amin Shea,
Peter Sokolowski and I explore some aspect of the English language from the dictionary's vantage point.
An email from a listener called out the common but counterintuitive phrase, meteoric rise.
Meteors themselves are not known for their ascensions.
Idiom does sometimes fly in the face of experience, though.
Amon and Peter discuss.
An anonymous listener emailed recently that it had occurred to them that the often used phrase,
meteoric rise, as it describes them.
politicians newfound popularity or perhaps an actor's sudden fame is curious to say the least.
Meteors, as we know,
are asteroids that enter the Earth's atmosphere and never actually rise, they always fall.
The letter writer proposes that perhaps it was originally meant as a bit of wit.