Pylimitics

The message for to-day (which is the way “today” used to be written) is about hyphens. Using hyphens is a bit of a black art in English, and people have written many e-mails to publications criticizing this or that bit of hyphenation. There aren’t any rules. Or, really, there are rules, but they’re often contradictory.… Continue reading

When you’re feeling “in the pink”, that means you’re in excellent health and feeling fine. In his 1923 novel Inimitable Jeeves, P.G. Wodehouse used it this way:  “‘I am in excellent health, I thank you. And you?’ ‘In the pink. Just been over to America.’”  The first one to use “pink” in this sense was… Continue reading

In 1931, the Commission internationale de l’éclairage (International Commission on Illumination or “CIE”), created the CIE 1931 XYZ Color Space. It’s a way of plotting colors by their wavelengths in the visible (to humans) spectrum, and is still in use as the basis for describing (and matching) specific colors when you’re working with, say, ink,… Continue reading

In many books — the old kind, actually printed in real ink on real paper — there’s a page near the end that tells you some things about the book itself. Sometimes it lists the typefaces used, occasionally the paper, and maybe even some of the people involved in creating the book, such as the… Continue reading

English is sort of a sponge among languages. English words are borrowed from just about all other languages. “Sponge,” by the way, comes originally from Greek — except for the “sponge” that’s the heel part of a horseshoe; that comes from the Latin word for a supporting frame, like a bedframe. That’s what they’re talking… Continue reading