Pylimitics

You can get a pretty good idea of the functions of a language by examining its words. This is more than that old saw about “Eskimo having 27 words for ‘snow’.” That was probably apocryphal anyway, but I’m not just talking about nouns. The nouns in a language do, of course, give some insight into… Continue reading

When it’s time to teach children the alphabet, in English it goes like this: you learn the names of the letters, then some words that start with those letters. “Ae,” “bee,” cee,” and so on are what English letters are called, of course. Made-up words that generally don’t mean anything else. Learning the alphabet in… Continue reading

For centuries, one of the most powerful weapons available to anyone was some kind of sword. Swords appeared in various forms in all sorts of cultures, and the skill of using a sword for fighting was developed to quite a high level. You’d think, in all those years and among all those experts, that the… Continue reading

Consider the humble “humble.” “Humble” is a word that’s been part of English since about the 1200s, which is a pretty long time. And in those centuries, “humble” has meant some very different things compared to how we use it now. In a sense, it’s the opposite of “proud.”  That meaning is one of a… Continue reading

Up until about the 1970s, a movie that was a goofy, possibly slapstick comedy would be advertised as “zany” and “madcap.” Both of those words are less common in recent decades, but still around.  By coincidence, both words appeared in English around the 1500s, even though that century isn’t generally remembered as a golden era… Continue reading