Archive for the ‘Such Language!’ Category
Trawling for Meaning
In a short posting yesterday ("Trolling for Phone Sex?") I quoted a paragraph about a curious use of the word "trolling" by the President, a word whose slang meaning is "to cruise for sex". In the comments, Chris pointed out that, in a similar situation, he would use the verb "to trawl" which, by analogy […]
Call It Macaroni
He [Parson Woodforde, writing in his diary c. 1820, in England] also, on more than one occasion, notes eating a somewhat exotic starch: "Maccaroni," which had been popularized in England by young men returning from the Italian portions of the Grand Tour. (Some of these aristocratic young men, in the mid-eighteenth cnetury, formed a club […]
In: All, Eureka!, Such Language!
Style Q&A
Thanks to Maud Newton (in "Miscellany") I learned that the Chigago Manual of Style has posted new Q&A. I whet your appetite with but one example: Q. The information posted on the Possessives and Attributives Web page comes close to answering my question, but I would appreciate a more detailed explanation: Did we have dinner […]
Death Promotes Life?
Speaking of humpty-dumptyism, Josh Rosenau* pointed out this curiously overt example to issue from the mouth of Kansas Senator Brownback# If use of the death penalty is contrary to promoting a culture of life, we need to have a national dialogue and hear both sides of the issue. Fascinating. —– * Josh Roseanau, "Brownback confused […]
In: All, Raised Eyebrows Dept., Such Language!
Cottonmouth Water Moccasins
Continuing the path started in a previous small but informative posting ("Clam Names") towards sorting out common names for common objects, today I discovered in reading the latest New Yorker that the "water moccasin" and "cottonmouth" snake are one and the same. Ever since my youth, when we'd visit my maternal grandparents on their farm […]
To Some Extent
It's fun — indeed, one of my favorite pasttimes — to hear what new catch phrase politicians will come up with next. The phrases don't always catch on, but they keep trying; it seems there's a sort of verbal Darwinism at work. A notable example of unfortunately longevity was Nixon's "point in time", which finally […]
In: All, Plus Ca Change..., Such Language!
Prez Whiz
While doing some research this morning for a different essay, I read this assessment by Hendrik Hertzberg of a phrase in Bush's 2004 State of the Union Address: In last year’s State of the Union, Bush’s buzz phrase was “weapons of mass destruction,” the threat of which justified the impending conquest of Iraq. This year’s […]
In: All, Such Language!
Centuries Old Truths
A month ago I wrote a posting ("Mystery and Creationism") in which I suggested that Christian fundamentalists who feel that their religion is imcompatible with science should take the advice of the late Pope and ascribe the incomprehensibility to mystery, since mystery is theologically acceptable. In that piece, I quoted someone quoting Pope John Paul […]
In: All, Such Language!, The Art of Conversation
Ali Baba's Ass
In this week's Carnival of Education, hostess Ms. Frizzle tells of an e-mail contribution she received from one Graycie, an anecdote about Graycie's first ever day of teaching, which reportedly happened years ago: The assigned first unit of the year for me was short stories. The first part of this unit covered the characteristics of […]
In: All, Such Language!
Surveying Elayne
I can always count on Elayne Riggs to point the way to curious, informative, and entertaining reading on the Web. I don't know how she manages to keep an eye on all her sources, but I'm grateful. Somehow, I managed to fall behind by a few weeks on my survey of her surveys, so I'm […]
In: All, Curious Stuff, Such Language!
The Matthew Effect
A little while back ("Let's Play Internet!") I wrote about trying to track down an authoritative attribution for this quotation: The plural of "anecdote" is not "data". It was fun but inconclusive, barely penetrating the surface of the murky waters of misattribution. It's a game I enjoy playing, although I only get to play in […]
Let's Play Internet!
I won't claim this observation is at all profound, but it is curious, I thought.* Is this an example of a new game, named something like "Internet Quoting", akin to the well-known game known variously as "Telephone" or "Rumors" or "Whispers"? In the older game of telephone, one person in a line of, say, 20 […]
In: All, Common-Place Book, Such Language!, The Art of Conversation
Republican Chickenhawks
Just within the last few decades, I can remember actually hearing people, within hearing distance of my own ears, complain about how the word "gay" has been lost from the average (heterosexual) vernacular. You know, all those middle-aged white guys who wanted to tell you all about, say, how they were feeling so happy that […]
gettysburg.ppt
In the fullness of time, even I will finally trip over some otherblog's pointer to a must-see corner of the Web that everyone else has known about for years.* But finally, finally I did: Lincoln's "Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation", brought to us since 2000 by Peter Norvig. I won't excerpt any of it, since 1) the […]
In: All, Such Language!, The Art of Conversation
Brazen & Corrupt
Sometimes it's just too challenging, over and over, coming up with properly* excoriating language to describe the current President and his Administration; there are just too many occasions that require just too many words, that mere vocabulary tends to fall short. Sometimes, too, my memory lets me down. I've had the feeling that, on the […]
In: All, Splenetics, Such Language!
Wow! What Commas!
Every time I quote something from The Huffington Post, I usually make a remark about all the writing errors (grammatical, punctuation, syntax, spelling, you name it) in the piece I'm quoting. Why, I keep wondering rhetorically, doesn't Arianna pay me a reasonable if somewhat over generous retainer to copy edit the pieces from her "celebrity" […]
I'm a Serial Sperm Killer
I ask you, how could I not at least notice the headline of this little Paul Waldman piece from The Gadflyer? Stop the Sperm Massacre! President Bush has opened my eyes to what may be the greatest tragedy currently taking place in our nation. Embryos, he has told us, are "life" that must not be […]
In: All, Raised Eyebrows Dept., Such Language!
Hot Cocked
On Wednesday afternoon, I was sitting in a hushed, carpeted room in one of the National Science Foundation towers, in Bollston, Virginia. I was on a review panel, and we were quietly deliberating the relative mertits of a stack of proposals. One of the reviewers, who was in constant touch with her staff and the […]
In: All, Raised Eyebrows Dept., Such Language!
My Religion
Come to think of it, I don't think I've mentioned so far in this venue my own, personal lack of religious faith (i.e., that null set of beliefs which some people persist in confusing with a religion of its own, even though I think that that metaphysical conundrum is much simpler to resolve, say, than […]
In: All, Eureka!, Such Language!
A-F Friendly
"Riff" is a great word, although I feel a bit — not quite estranged, since we never had a relationship to begin with — distant from "riff", and I doubt that I will ever be as close as I am to truly favorite words like "madcap" and "chuffed". No doubt this is tied to my […]
In: All, Raised Eyebrows Dept., Such Language!