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A quart of prevention…
When someone is suspected of carrying a contagious disease, they might be placed in quarantine. “Quarantine” has an unexpected sound for that context; doesn’t it remind you of quarter or quartile? Well it should! “Quarantine” is derived from the French “quarante,” which means “forty.” In English when we want to say something like about forty… Continue reading
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Which amendment was that?
ICE gestapo monsters left a 12-year-old standing alone, unaccompanied, on a sidewalk after snatching their adult companion. It seems to me this sort of thing could escalate into exactly what that amendment about “a well regulated militia” was supposed to be about. Not good. Continue reading
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Independence Declaration
Calendar-wise, we’re nearing the neighborhood of Independence Day in the US, and it occurs to me that France was the most important ally of the revolutionary American colonies — in fact, France provided the word “declaration,” as in Declaration of Independence. In typical US fashion, we celebrate that document’s signing on July 4, but it… Continue reading
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Lexical ketchup burst
You’ve heard of “generation X.” It may or may not have come from a book, but a big reason everybody started using the term was Douglas Coupland’s 1991 book Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. It was a very popular book about both the present and the future, and included a glossary of all… Continue reading
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The NYT appears to be wrong again
The New York Times story about the orange baby’s declaration of victory over the Houthis in Yemen is “provably unreliable in at least two ways: the timeline, and the claimed involvement of Trump.” So is Maggie Haberman just a chump who gets played constantly? Or maybe it’s all on purpose. Continue reading
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We don’t have kings because we can’t afford them
“Let me step away from current events for a moment and ask what may seem like an odd historical question: Why did absolute monarchy disappear from the Western world in the 18th and 19th centuries? How did republics or constitutional monarchies that basically functioned as republics become the norm?” “A large part of the answer… Continue reading
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Re-righting history
“There’s a kind of desperation that clings to propaganda dressed as commentary—an ache to not only rewrite the record but to salt the earth where truth once stood. The Telegraph’s April 14 op-ed, ‘Trump has been proven right about pretty much everything,‘ by former UK Prime Minister Liz Truss, is one such piece.” –Joan Westenberg Continue reading
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Nonsense can get lucky
“A rational astrology is a set of beliefs which one rationally behaves as if were true, regardless of whether they are in fact. Rational astrologies need not be entirely fake or false…. Some rational astrologies may turn out to be largely true, and that happy coincidence can be a great blessing. But they are still… Continue reading
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Not Numidinae
It’s nowhere near November or Thanksgiving, so we have plenty of time to consider the word “turkey.” The first thing to consider is that the bird has that name because of a mistake. The North American species was confused with a bird called a “guinea fowl,” and those were thought to be from Turkey. Two… Continue reading
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Peeves, pet and otherwise
A lot of English speakers — and maybe this goes for other languages too — have pet peeves about the way other people use, misuse, or “misuse” words. The words compose and comprise are easy to get mixed up. Or maybe not. If you go by the “first” definitions of both of these, then you’d… Continue reading
About Me
I’m Pete Harbeson, a writer located near Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to writing my own content, I’ve learned to translate for my loquacious and opinionated pup Chocolate. I shouldn’t be surprised, but she mostly speaks in doggerel. You can find her contributions tagged with Chocolatiana.
Recent Posts
- A quart of prevention…
- Which amendment was that?
- Independence Declaration
- Lexical ketchup burst
- The NYT appears to be wrong again
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