Interesting Words
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I think everybody (at least in the US) has heard of “John Doe”, the fictional name used in legal cases as a substitute for a real name that’s being kept secret. But “John Doe” is a lot older than you might think. In English law it goes back to at least the 1500s. A rulebook… Continue reading
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Jobbernowl
Inexplicably, some quite handy words that can be used to point out someone’s lack of intellectual capacity have become quite obscure. This is in spite of current events, which certainly seem to be particularly characterized by individuals with such shortcomings. One word that’s quite rare but pretty expressive is “jobbernowl.” “Jobbernowl” simply means a stupid… Continue reading
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I’m so insulted
The phrase “adding insult to injury” seems, on the face of it, to be a bit silly. Is it supposed to mean that after you do somebody harm, calling them names makes it worse? That’s not what it was intended to mean though — it comes from a time when “insult” didn’t have quite the… Continue reading
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English is comical
Shakespeare, as most people know, added a great number of words and phrases to English. The same is true of some other esteemed writers, including John Milton and others. By “others”, of course, you’ll probably have guessed that I mean people like Billy De Beck. He was active in the first half of the 20th… Continue reading
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Idiolects, acrolects, and isolects, oh my!
A question that often comes up when discussing unusual words is whether a word is a “real” word. There isn’t a pat answer in English, since there’s nobody in charge to decide which words are and aren’t real. One big hurdle is “being in the dictionary,” but that’s a pretty gray area too. There are… Continue reading
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Don’t believe a word of it
It seems pretty common, nowadays, to believe that people in the Middle Ages thought the world was flat Modern depictions of Christopher Columbus often touch on the idea, either by implication or by arguing loudly, as in Hare We Go, the 1951 Bugs Bunny cartoon in which Bugs sails with Columbus, who had argued with… Continue reading
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Glom onto this
If you “glom” something, or “glom onto” it, you’re taking it or occupying it. Although it sounds like a slang term, you can find it published in newspapers, magazines, and even Science Daily: “The nanoparticles ‘glom onto the flies,’ Rand noted while watching a video of flies in the test tubes.” Not only is “glom”… Continue reading
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Success Lies Beyond the Velleity Veil
If you know somebody who’s always talked about visiting, say, Alaska or Paris but never actually makes plans to go there, or somebody who tends to accumulate too much stuff in their house and is always right on the cusp of getting the clutter organized, you know somebody engages in “velleity.” “Velleity” is more obscure… Continue reading
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EGOT
People win Nobel prizes every year. There’s a world champion in most organized sports, mostly annually. Even Olympic medals, handed out only every four years, are not all that rare, really. But only two people in the history of the world are PEGOT recipients, and only 15 have achieved the nearly-as-difficult EGOT. The problem, of… 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.