Nuts and Bolts: more or less zero.

 The Word Den was musing on the word dox last week, and that brought the word doxy into view.

What a language English is, where the word doxy can mean either belief (particularly about something religious) or a mistress (and sometimes a paid one).

Luckily the number of people who'd use the word doxy in either sense is small (the mistress meaning of the word is obsolete); and the number of people who'd use both words must be more or less zero...

...not that you can have less than zero people...

or should that be fewer?

Oh good grief. Why is this language stuff so difficult??

Word To Use Today: doxy. The religious-belief word comes from the suffix -doxy, as in orthodoxy. This must have been quite a daring act of word-formation for a theologian (orthos means correct, and doxa means a belief). 

The word doxy meaning mistress probably comes from the Middle Flemish docke, which means doll.