If a sailor pulled up his anchor only to discover that one of the flukes had snagged a big fluke, they would probably dismiss it as just a fluke. But the real fluke would, of course, be that the sailor had inadvertently encountered all three English words that are “fluke” in the course of a Continue reading

In the computing field there’s a word: “kludge.” It’s mysterious in a couple of ways. It means a solution to a problem — usually a software solution — that’s clumsy, thrown together, and inelegant, but works anyway (at least for the moment).  The first mystery about “kludge” is how it’s spelled. The word is generally Continue reading

Everything that’s on sale is for sale, but not everything for sale is on sale. It hasn’t always been that way. If you go back far enough — say to the 700s — “sell” meant to give. You can find it in Beowulf, and that’s what it meant in those days.  A couple of centuries Continue reading

People who live in different places, even though they speak the same language, tend to have different accents. Accents are not as diverse as they used to be, probably because everybody now listens to the same voices on TV, radio, and digital media. Even on local radio and TV stations, announcers seem to mostly sound Continue reading

It’s tax-returnseason in the US, which means that people across the country have been eagerly searching for “loopholes.” And the regime, of course, is all about loopholes, like most grifters. A loophole is a detail in a rule or law or regulation that enables you to argue, with varying degrees of success, that the rule Continue reading

I mean to explore a fantastic word today, but in the meantime, let’s instead talk about a very pedestrian one. How about… “meantime”? “Meantime” has the same meaning as “meanwhile,” and they’re both in common usage. Both refer to the unspecified time that occurs between one thing and another. The interesting thing about “meantime” is Continue reading

If you’re a vegetarian or vegan in 2025, you don’t eat meat. But if you’re a vegetarian or vegan with a time machine who zips back to England about a thousand years ago or more, you’d find yourself eating meat all the time. This isn’t because of a previously undocumented side effect of time machines Continue reading

“Macro-” is a prefix meaning large or intensified in some way. It comes from the Greek “makro-” (long), which is also the source of the Latin “macer” (lean). Macer itself is the source of the English word “meager,” which, paradoxically, means scanty; not enough. Almost the opposite of “macro.”  There are a great many English Continue reading

English is changing all the time. That’s why it’s tricky to claim that somebody has used “the wrong word” in a particular case. Nobody decides what English words are supposed to mean — instead, if a word is “commonly” used in a particular way, well, that’s pretty much what it means. More or less. Of Continue reading