Pylimitics

Wouldn’t it be nice if English words, once they meant something specific, just retained that meaning? Well, it might be nice, but it definitely wouldn’t be “nice.” The word “nice,” over the many, many years the word has existed, had these meanings: silly, lascivious, ostentatious, scrupulous, fastidious, polite, respectable, cowardly, lazy, delicate, strange, shy, undecided,… Continue reading

If you embark on a “wild goose chase”, you’re trying to do something that’s probably not going to work. But where did that phrase come from?  Most people assume that it would be very difficult to catch a wild goose, so the idea of chasing one is foolish and pointless. You’ll even see that explanation… Continue reading

Words and language are a sort of fashion just as subject to fads and not-necessarily-sensible ideas as to what colors are “in” and what one “simply must” wear. One linguistic fashion that’s appeared once or twice in English is the desire to sound more Latin.  Everybody knows — or at least they should — that… Continue reading

The word “literally” comes from the Latin “literalis’ (pertaining to letters) and its (ahem) literal meaning is “word for word” or “exactly.” You most often see it used in sentences like this: “After getting that promotion I was literally walking on air.” Now, it’s very close to literally true that the speaker was not literally… Continue reading

In the US, people “line up”, while in the UK, people “queue up”. But in 1837, Thomas Carlyle wrote: “That talent…of spontaneously standing in queue, distinguishes the French People.” The use of “queue” to mean a sequence of people waiting for their turn dates from the 1790s — in French. Carlyle’s quote from 1827 is… Continue reading

Imagine what it’s like to know nothing at all about how to read. Not even a general idea that the marks on a page are “letters” that represent sounds, or that when put together they represent the words you’re already familiar with hearing. If you’re from a society that’s mostly illiterate, or “preliterate,” it might… Continue reading

Spring is here, so it’s getting to be time for gardening. If you’re good at gardening, you’re said to have a “green thumb.” But get on a plane from New York to London and somewhere along the way a strange anatomical effect occurs: the green leaves your thumb and seeps sideways, and by the time… Continue reading