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Paraphernalia
These days, “paraphernalia” is just another word for “stuff”. Look around you; almost no matter where you are you’ll see some paraphernalia. It wasn’t always this way, you know. Not that humans haven’t tended to surround themselves with the flotsam and jetsam of the acquisitive behaviors they inherited from an ancient line of great apes Continue reading
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November 24
Every once in a while there’s a day that seems to be tied to an idea. The thing is, it’s not always easy to discover what the idea is. Take today, for example. November 24 is “Evolution Day” in celebration of the date in 1859 that Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. It Continue reading
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Starting with alumina
Curses, foiled again! Aluminum is a metal we encounter many times per day, which might raise an interesting question: why is it called “aluminium” in England and “aluminum” in the US? It’s not just a matter of an idiosyncratic pronunciation of “aluminum.” In England and the US the spelling shifts to match the pronunciation. It Continue reading
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November 23
Have you ever wondered why actors are called “thespians”? It’s because of November 23. Partly, anyway. This is the day in 534 BCE that, according to Aristotle, someone named “Thespis” was the first person to portray a character on stage in a play. We’re talking about well over two thousand years ago, when record keeping Continue reading
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Janskys, smoots, and eotvos, oh my!
Most people are generally aware of volts, a measure of electricity named after Alessandro Volta. Another electrical measure is the ohm. That was named after Georg Ohm. And amps, or amperes, are named after André-Marie Ampere. Perhaps you see a pattern here. Measures and standards established in the past two or three centuries are often Continue reading
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Blue by you
There’s something about the color blue that’s a little different from other colors. I’m not sure what it is, but for some reason you can find more weird references to “blue” than any other color. Here are just a few of them. “Blue murder” is an expression from the 1800s that means a cry of Continue reading
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Born today: Bernays and Earl
November 22 is a day that may be remembered in some future societies as a black mark on history, and the point at which our current society embraced propaganda and deception as industrial-class tools to be freely used at a vast scale. It all started in 1891 and 1893, when, two years apart, two men Continue reading
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November 22
It’s November twenty-second, and strangely enough there’s a long string of connections. “The problem here is that you will reach a point where it might be difficult to decide which are reality and which are nightmare.” It all started in 1961, when a dancer named Liz Powell was hospitalized for exhaustion. She’d been experiencing a Continue reading
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Hypocorism
A “hypocorism” is a pet name or familiar name. “Jimmy” for “James” or “Betty” for “Elizabeth.” “Hypocorism” probably needs a pet name of its own. It’s one of the rarest words in English (and that’s saying something). It was included in the 1899 edition of the OED, and classified as “rare” even then. The OED, Continue reading
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Gamp
Some writers have contributed enormously to English. Shakespeare, of course, is the one everybody thinks of. John Milton added even more words than Shakespeare. And don’t forget about Charles Dickens! Dickens usually wrote about working-class people in 1800s England. His characters were often poorly educated and communicated in slang, and some of what Dickens contributed 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 Bossypaws. I shouldn’t be surprised, but 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.
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