Pylimitics

It’s a somewhat puzzling state of affairs. There are quite a few characters and symbols we routinely use in addition to the regular alphabet; things like “@,” “#,” and even the common “*.” These commonly used symbols don’t have consistent names. But there are also many other characters and symbols that are only in use… Continue reading

You might do something wrong but then get away scot free, able to hopscotch your way home to Scotland enjoy some butterscotch. Scotland, of course, is the nation north of England. But the other scot references there have nothing to do with the place or the people.  “Scot free” comes from an old Scandanavian word,… Continue reading

Most people know that an “acronym” is a word created from the first letters of a group of different words, like “NASA” (National Aeronautics and Space Administration). The “-nym” part of “acronym” is from the Greek word “onoma”, which means name. The “acro-“ part is also from Greek: “akros” means the top of something.  You… Continue reading

Comics and comic art have format and style, both unique. So why, you might wonder, doesn’t it have a vocabulary as well? Wonder no more; the genre does have a vocabulary. The late Mort Walker, who for decades drew the newspaper comic strips Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois, came up with the vocabulary in… Continue reading

You don’t hear the word “chauvinism” as much as you did a while back, when “male chauvinist” was a common epithet. As you probably know, “male chauvinism” is the belief that males are inherently superior to females. It was primarily applied to men — that is, human males, although I suppose a true believer might… Continue reading