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Flummox
It first showed up in The Pickwick Papers, published in 1836. Charles Dickens was the author, but it was his first novel, and originally he used the pseudonym “Boz.” He also used that name on his very first publication, Sketches by Boz. Incidentally, the original title of The Pickwick Papers was the The Posthumous Papers… Continue reading
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Sarah Bagley
Labor activism, organizing, and battles between owners of machines and the people who operated them have been going on ever since industrial machinery has existed. Sarah George Bagley was born in New Hampshire, in the US, on April 19,1806, and was a labor leader during the 1840s. Bagley was born in a rural household; the… Continue reading
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(Lack of) Radio Silence
One characteristic of English that makes word games possible is the typical patterns of letter combinations. For instance, there are combinations like “st” and “pr” that you run into all the time. On the other hand, you hardly ever see “kf” or “jp” in combination. When you find a word that includes a rare combination,… Continue reading
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A pine how-do-you-do
“Pining away” is something one does when exhausted by emotional suffering. Like when you’re a dog, and your human goes to work without you. Or when you’re the heroine of a romance novel and your prince charming is called away by the king to go into battle against the bad guys. Nowadays it’s considered a… Continue reading
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Take me out to the ball game
It’s spring, and in the US that means the Baseball Season is here. Baseball is a sport that’s been around for about 150 years or so, and at one time was the most popular sport in the US — and was called the “national game.” Even so, it’s played in very few other countries (Japan… Continue reading
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Audrey Tang
Audrey Tang Feng was born April 18 in 1981. If you’re into Perl programming, you know them as a community leader. If you’re way into Perl programming and aware of the, um, discussion around Perl 5 versus Perl 6, you know them as the leader of the Pugs project to implement a compiler for Raku… Continue reading
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A nickel for a knucker
Beowulf, a long poem written sometime around 1000 CE (give or take a century or so), at one point mentions a monster named Nickera, who lives in a lake. In the poem it appears that “Nickera” is the monster’s name, but actually “nicker” (or nicor) was an Old English word for any sort of imaginary… Continue reading
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One Swell Foop
Probably because I’m so fell, it fell to me in one fell swoop, as I worked a fell on my loom in my home in the fell, clothed in fells of sheep, to recount the odd history of “fell.” “Fell” is a perfectly common, modern word. And it’s also rare. And it’s also obsolete and… Continue reading
About Me
I’m Pete Harbeson, a writer (among other things) located near Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to writing my own content, I’ve learned to translate for my loquacious and opinionated pup Chocolate Bossypaws. No surprise, she mostly speaks in doggerel. You can find her contributions tagged with Chocolatiana.
Check out my other blog, Techlimitics, where I’m grappling with the nature of simplicity. You can also find some of my minor software projects at GitHub. Nothing very impressive. I mostly write tiny utilities in Python.
I find myself suddenly de-corporatized (their choice, not mine). To help keep the lights on, buy me a coffee!
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Contact
peterharbeson@me.com