In the modern meaning of “sinister but adroit or dexterous”, there is nothing wrong, beyond the fact that wicked persons who are also clever should possibly be avoided. For lexicographers and others who remember their Latin, however, the question brings a snort and a smile or frown. Sinister and dexterous come directly from Latin. Adroit also [more...]
A frequently-repeated etymology of the fruit that we call an “orange” goes like this: The fruit was not grown in England, and when the dock-hands unloaded the cargo ships they heard the fruit referred to by its Spanish name: naranja. From this it became known as “a norange”, but over time this became “an orange” which [more...]
Growing up in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, I always referred to carbonated soft drinks as “pop,” or maybe “soda pop.” So I became confused sometime later when I moved briefly to California and was surprised to hear cans or bottles of pop referred to as “sodas” — to me, a soda is [more...]
A pangram is a sentence that contains all the letters of the alphabet. If no letters are repeated, the sentence is a perfect pangram. Perfect pangrams can be rather unsatisfying, because they need to make use of obscure words, abbreviations, slang or proper nouns. Here are a few perfect pangrams: Cwm fjord bank glyphs vext quiz Quartz [more...]
If you visit South Africa, you’ll find that English is now the main language for signage, education and tourism. But South African English, as well as being spoken with a distinctive accent, has adopted many words from the Afrikaans language, and from various African languages including Zulu and Xhosa. Here are some of the words that [more...]
Difficult economic times bring waves of employees getting fired. Frequently, the message is blunted by the use of official flowery prose and politically correct corporate euphemisms. On the other hand, employees losing their jobs tend to use short and punchy colloquial expressions when talking about what happened to them. Some terms tend to be used when [more...]
If you’ve ever heard a song on the radio or an album and thought the words said something other than what they really were, you’ve experienced a mondegreen. Although “mondegreen” usually refers to misunderstood song lyrics, it can also refer to any poetry or even statement that’s misunderstood because of words or phrases that sound [more...]
The impact of an expletive comes from the timing and the tone of voice. It’s possible to achieve much the same effect with words that, in themselves, are bland enough for a superbowl commercial. Fake swearing is apparently also known as minced oaths or pseudo-profanity. Back at high school I knew a guy who could say [more...]
The curious notion of life imitating art was expressed by Oscar Wilde as “Life imitates art, more than art imitates life“. It’s a turnaround from the usual situation in which the artist creates art inspired by the life and world around them. When life imitates art, reality reflects what had previously been expressed in art [more...]
When you go hunting for furniture, you may see an antique day-bed or sofa, fall in love with it, and not care what it’s called. Or you may want to know which of the various French names for different designs suits it best. Is a récamier the same as a chaise longue? And what about [more...]
Personification is a literary device or figure of speech in which objects or abstract ideas are given human characteristics such as abilities or feelings. Although personification is very common in literature and poetry, it also is used in everyday speech. Here are some examples of personification in poetry and literature: William Shakespeare, Sonnet IX: “The world will [more...]
There are so many bad puns around, it’s hard to pick the worst. But here are some of the contenders: Two oranges go into a bar. One turns to the other and says, “Your round.” Then there’s the mystic who goes to the dentist to get a tooth pulled. But he refuses to take a painkiller, explaining [more...]
Many sticklers for grammar insist that it’s very bad form to wantonly split an infinitive. But what is a split infinitive, and what’s the problem? The infinitive is the plain form of a verb, preceded by the word “to”. For example: to be, to run, to have, to eat, to love. One way to look at [more...]
Wabi sabi is a Japanese world view which embraces the beauty of things that are modest, humble, unconventional, even imperfect or incomplete, and celebrates those things for their positive values. Perhaps the closest that westerners can come to this idea is to admire “rustic simplicity”. It’s also the concept behind the western admiration of “hand made” [more...]
The longest word in a recognized English language dictionary is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, but few people would ever have used that word or heard it spoken. So what is the longest word that is in everyday speech? I wasn’t sure how to define common usage, so I settled on a completely arbitrary criterion: the word needed to have [more...]
To figure out what is the longest word, we need to ask ourselves first what a “real” word is. In scientific usage, you can give chemicals names hundreds or even thousands of letters long by stringing together all sorts of word parts. Also, at least in theory, just as you could have an anti-missile, you [more...]
What’s the correct spelling of practice/practise and licence/license in every situation? As you probably already know, it depends on where you live, and how the words are being used. In United States English, it’s always “practice” and “license”, whether the word acts as a noun or a verb. An American will practice driving to gain a [more...]
The collective noun for a group of bankers is a wunch, which is defined by the Urban Dictionary as “a gathering, a group, or a gaggle of people that work in a financial institution”. Collective nouns are also available for other professions. Who hasn’t encountered an asylum of managers, a cast of actors, a clutch of mechanics, [more...]