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I love slang dictionaries. For one thing they allow me to expand my vocabulary in ways that regular dictionaries just don’t allow, or at least make a lot more difficult because, even when regular dictionaries include slang terms, they’re buried among all sorts of normal, boring words. When I saw the new Routledge Dictionary of [...]
There’s a story I heard several years ago, probably in college where I was steeped in misinformation, that the word “kangaroo†came from the Aboriginal for “I don’t knowâ€. The way it was told to me, English explorers (or settlers, or prisoners) pointed to kangaroos and asked an Aboriginal man, “What are those called?” And [...]
Etymology can be a tricky thing. When I heard the word juggernaut, for instance, I assume it came from Latin, possibly from iactare, “to throwâ€. It didn’t make sense, but, hey, weird mutations occur in language sometimes. In fact the word comes from Hindu mythology. Juggernaut was a title of Krishna, and, according to the [...]
Sometimes a simple word just won’t do. Every once in a while I’d rather use a fancy twenty-dollar word than a worn-down two-bit one. And on occasion I just want to make the people around me stop and say, “What?” That’s why, instead of describing something like, say, an ice cream cone as “cone-shaped”, I [...]
How do you know when a word should be hyphenated and when it shouldn’t? It often depends on usage. Take, for example, the word hitchhike, which almost always throws me because I have to stop and think, “Are there two h’s in the middle or does the first one absorb the second?” Hyphenating the word–as [...]
There used to be a woman from Ireland in the office where I work, and not only was she an extremely friendly, funny person but she also managed to expand my vocabulary. One of my favorite words of hers was gormless. Whenever she’d have to deal with some idiot on the phone she’d hang [...]
There are a few words or expressions that come directly to English from other languages without being changed, especially French, which has given us expressions like c’est la vie, and faux pas, or words like ennui. A friend of mine once picked a French sentence, “passé le moutardâ€, and decided to just use it [...]
Once, talking to a friend of mine, I described something as esoteric, and he said, “You mean it has nudity in it?” Maybe it says something about the way his mind worked that he confused esoteric with erotic–two things which are distinctly different. The word esoteric, derived from a Greek word meaning “within”, means something [...]
Several days ago a friend sent me a message via Facebook that said, “It’s your move in Scrabulous!” Since I can’t turn down a challenge I immediately joined the fray and was doing pretty well…until this morning. I logged in and got this message: It doesn’t matter that I was ahead by about thirty [...]
Every once in a while I run across an obsolete or rare word that’s so lovely I want to put it into general circulation. A good example is demilune, which means “half moonâ€, derived, of course, from “lunaâ€, the Latin word for “moon†and “demiâ€, which comes from French, but was also originally derived from [...] |
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