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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)