Pylimitics

The medical community sometimes tries to suggest that “addiction” should be limited to its clinical sense — that is, it’s not helpful to a discussion of physical addiction to, say, opiates, if it’s also common to say things like “I love chocolate; I’m really addicted,” or “I’m addicted to that new coffee shop.” As almost… Continue reading

Here’s a pair of words that have diverged in meaning: “awful” and “awesome.” When you say something is “awful,” you mean it’s bad. I’m not going out today; the weather is awful. But “awesome” is good. Let’s go out and enjoy the awesome weather. Of the two words, “awful” is the older one, dating back… Continue reading

An interesting way to look at dictionary definitions is to look at the definition by itself and see whether you can figure out the word it’s attempting to define. For example, if you see “any one of the berries, growing in clusters on a vine, and from the juice of which wine is made,” you… Continue reading

Back in, say, 1600 or so, if you were going to combine two things, you were probably very pleased to be able to choose between two relatively new words: “conflate” and “commingle.” “Conflate”, at least in the 1600s, meant “put together,” and “commingle” meant (and still means) “mix together.” Pretty close to the same thing,… Continue reading