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Did you happen to animadvert?
If one time-traveled to the here and now from, say, about 1650, probably the very first thing they’d animadvert is that nobody animadverts any more. Or more precisely, they might animadvert (at least on their phone), but practically everyone has forgotten what “animadvert” means. In fact, everyone has forgotten so completely that “animadvert,” which in… Continue reading
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Spelling
English is definitely not among the languages where words are spelled phonetically. In phonetic languages, spelling errors are probably much rarer than in English, where they’re depressingly common. One of the problems with spelling in English is homonyms — words that sound exactly the same, but are different words. There are some unusual homonyms lurking… Continue reading
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Doc Ricketts
If you’ve read Cannery Row by John Steinbeck (published in 1945), you may remember the character Doc. The novel is set in Monterey, California, during the Great Depression (1929 to about 1939), when Monterey was primarily a fishing village. The title refers to a street where several fish-packaging businesses are located; it was informally called… Continue reading
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Moveable Horns?
If you visit Yale University, you might view the portico of Davenport College, or even catch a glimpse of the official banner of the university’s president. If you do, you’ll see a yale. Not, mind you, a Yale — that would be a direct descendant of Elihu Yale, who was a governor of the British… Continue reading
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Beached
If you find yourself on a desert island without a boat, what you are is “stranded.” On the face of it, that seems like an unusual term to use for that situation; why not “trapped” or something? By the way, if your pirate crew got tired of always having to let you win at Scrabble… Continue reading
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A shot heard ’round the world?
Before a “big shot” was a person — like in “Unless the memory plays us a trick, Al Capone is the ‘big shot’ of Chicago gangland” (1930), it was literally a shot. One that was, and I suppose this would be obvious, comparatively large. Guns were probably invented in China around 1000 CE. They took… Continue reading
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Alexis Clairaut
Just about everybody has heard of Isaac Newton, who figured out a lot of stuff that’s pretty basic to modern science and engineering. But just because Newton came up with his his principles and observations didn’t mean that everybody simply said “Oh, yes, that’s a better way to understand the universe.” It’s science, after all,… Continue reading
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Can ye?
To be “canny” means being prudent or knowing about something. It originated in Scottish and in northern English dialects as a modification of the word “can,” as in “able to.” The word entered literary English in the 1600s and at first tended to be applied to Scots themselves. The common stereotype of Scottish people even… Continue reading
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“To the lighthouse”
During the reign of Ptolomy II, between about 280 and 247 BCE, the Ptolemaic Kingdom built the Lighthouse of Alexandria on Pharos, a little island in the Nile delta. Because of its location the lighthouse came to be called the Pharos of Alexandria. It was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, and… Continue reading
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Obscurity? Where?
Sometimes you run across a word that’s so obscure, obsolete, or forgotten that it doesn’t even appear in the best dictionaries. Adoxography is one example; it’s pretty difficult to find a definition, and you have to go back to the early 20th century to find any examples of it. Nevertheless, “adoxography” — the method of… Continue reading
About Me
I’m Pete Harbeson, a writer located near Boston, Massachusetts. This site is just a hobby, at least for now.
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