In my family as a kid we used the word breakfast food for cereal even when we ate it at night before bed (a custom (Continue Reading)
Pat’s Polemics
My new Web site
cc and stenopad
11/24/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentIn our own time we see the way words or parts of words (and in this one case an abbreviation) survive when the original meaning (Continue Reading)
Skitter
11/14/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentDefine skitter without demonstrating it, i.e. using just words. Great word, chiseling precisely a type of movement. Think of a spider skittering across the floor. (Continue Reading)
Snarky
11/03/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentThis word, so new to me, goes back to 1906 and has an earlier history as meaning ‘annoy’. Its use has sky-rocketed recently with a (Continue Reading)
Watching the mountain being born
04/30/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentLong time, no WOD. Here’s making up for it: Everyone remembers the amazing growth of a mountain right out of the earth as we watched. (Continue Reading)
Swoll
09/11/2017 Pat Barrett Add CommentIn school, I noticed a lot of the kids were using an old past participle, “swoll”, to describe what we called buff, i.e. a bit (Continue Reading)
wonky and random
12/21/2016 Pat Barrett Add CommentWonky is a new word for me and random is not, but the meaning of both have changed. Wonky means someone obsessed with the minutiae (Continue Reading)
Urban = Black
10/27/2016 Pat Barrett Add CommentAgain I heard a speaker use the term “urban” as a synonym for Black in the ethnic sense. Earlier, the mayor of Memphis had responded (Continue Reading)
How cliches wear down expressiveness and why we use them
09/14/2016 Pat Barrett Add CommentLiterally how many times have we heard someone say “literally” when they mean no such thing? I heard Trump say something the other day like that (Continue Reading)
KUDOS to you. One or two?
07/12/2016 Pat Barrett Add CommentI was surprised the other day to hear a head of an organization use a determiner with ‘kudos’ and do so correctly i.e. according to (Continue Reading)
employee is to employer as volunteer is to voluntee
06/01/2016 Pat Barrett Add CommentGrowing up I heard the word employer and employee. I took French and realized employee was the past participle of the Fr. verb employer, to (Continue Reading)
home place
05/13/2016 Pat Barrett Add CommentI just spotted a word I know in Kweyol: lakou. In Russian, dvor describes it. In Spanish, maybe patio. It is the center of a (Continue Reading)
I’ll be hung/hanged
05/12/2016 Pat Barrett Add CommentQuite naturally I say, “Hitler hanged Bonhoefer and hung the conspirators on meat hooks.” I wonder if anyone knows how/why the past tense of hang (Continue Reading)
gender = sex? No.
05/09/2016 Pat Barrett Add CommentOne of my pet peeves has been the gradual shift in meaning of “gender” to mean the same as “sex”. Gender means “kind”, “sort”, while (Continue Reading)
Back to the good old gerundive
04/17/2016 Pat Barrett Add CommentDavid Lightfoot in The Development of Language, on p. 213 uses the participle and the gerundive in an interesting way, unusual in this day of (Continue Reading)
Whitey and honky – really?
03/09/2016 Pat Barrett Add CommentFrom time to time, the terms Whitey and Honky are referred to in writings about African-Americans. The most infamous example, to my mind, is when (Continue Reading)
How to make Arabic letters as a two year old would
11/09/2015 Pat Barrett Add CommentAbout 20 questions here. Why am I too lazy to find the Arabic alphabet? Do you want ya or ah, or both? And does the (Continue Reading)
Ain’t ain’t a word
09/24/2014 Pat Barrett Add CommentWhat I WANT to read: The Village Effect by Susan Pinker (she’s Steven’s sister). I have been saying for a long time now that the (Continue Reading)