Pat’s Polemics

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Snarky

  11/03/2018       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

This 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)

Word of the Day
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Watching the mountain being born

  04/30/2018       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Long 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)

Word of the Day

Swoll

  09/11/2017       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

In 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)

Word of the Day

wonky and random

  12/21/2016       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Wonky 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)

Word of the Day

How cliches wear down expressiveness and why we use them

  09/14/2016       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Literally 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)

grammar & language change, Word of the Day

KUDOS to you. One or two?

  07/12/2016       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

I 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)

Word of the Day

employee is to employer as volunteer is to voluntee

  06/01/2016       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Growing 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)

Uncategorized, Word of the Day

home place

  05/13/2016       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

I 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)

Word of the Day

I’ll be hung/hanged

  05/12/2016       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Quite 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)

Word of the Day

gender = sex? No.

  05/09/2016       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

One 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)

Word of the Day

Back to the good old gerundive

  04/17/2016       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

David 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)

Uncategorized, Word of the Day

Whitey and honky – really?

  03/09/2016       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

From 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)

Word of the Day

How to make Arabic letters as a two year old would

  11/09/2015       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

About 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)

Word of the Day

Erstwhile, desultory, inchoate

  03/05/2015       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

McWhorter, in Defining Creole, uses erstwhile frequently. The reason I am putting these up today is that it is a good example of misunderstanding a (Continue Reading)

Word of the Day

Ain’t ain’t a word

  09/24/2014       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

What 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)

Project 2025 in Action, Word of the Day
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