Pylimitics

People’s interactions are what drives the evolution of language, and the things that are common in a society tend to be the things that generate new words. The beginnings are often found as slang in a particular segment of the population, then some of the slang is adopted more widely. Incarceration is a more prominent… Continue reading

Jonathan Swift was a writer in the 1600s and 1700s who’s still famous for satire. He wrote “Gulliver’s Travels,” which nowadays most people think is a children’s story about a guy who somehow ends up in a land full of little tiny people, the Lilliputians. Really, though, the story about the Lilliputians is just one… Continue reading

Word of the day: druthers There’s an English phrase — primarily an Americanism — that you may not have encountered, at least not recently. If I had my druthers, of course, people would still use it all the time, but its use has always tended to be regional (used more in the southern states), and… Continue reading

If you’re interested in ancient tales set in the British Isles, and you’ve already read Beowulf, you might turn to the Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge or the Welsh Mabinogion. There’s a certain structure pretty common to epic stories from thousands of years ago; they’re a bit like super hero comics. There’s someone extraordinary who performs… Continue reading