Dear Geist,

Why does the word riff, which is so close to the word rift, have such a wildly rich etymological past, while rift quietly goes around in a small space with a couple of lives?

—Minnie Word (my real name!), Sacramento CA

Dear Minnie,

As with so many other living things, the difference here is where the two terms came from. Riff is known mostly as a passage of music—a favourite of a particular musician's repertoire, or of any entertainer's fans. From that, riff came to mean any short passage familiar to a performer, or to a group of friends or colleagues. The lexicographer and teacher Bryan Garner writes that those riffy terms are miles away from the original meaning of riff: “[1] a string of onions, [2] the diaphragm, and [3] the mange, an itchy rash.” “This particular riff,” Garner goes on, “seems to have originated as a truncated form of the musical term refrain.”

The word rift, though, appeared somewhere in middle English as a split or a crack—in a board, a thundercloud or a friendship—and is still used that way almost exclusively, if you don't count its short life as a term for “burp.”

—The Editors