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Competition for air space
The Guinness World Record for surviving the longest fall in a plunging elevator was set on July 28, 1945, when Betty Lou Oliver’s elevator dropped 75 stories in the Empire State Building in New York. Oliver broker her pelvis, back, and neck, but she recovered. She also recovered from severe burns — but she’d been Continue reading
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Do as I say, not as I do
If Shakespeare is in the lead in adding words and phrases to English (and actually he might not be), Charles Dickens is the champion of character names, particularly for his villains. Dickens’ characters often have funny, ironic, sarcastic, or otherwise telling names, and some of them also enter the language. It’s not terribly unusual, even Continue reading
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July 27
Today, July 27, is Bugs Bunny’s birthday! Well, sort of. This is the day that he first appeared on screen when A Wild Hare was released in 1940. He sprang to life fully formed; his first adventure was pestering Elmer Fudd, and he already had his signature line, What’s Up, Doc? Bugs usually delivers his Continue reading
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Come on, show some backbone
Medical doctors often specialize in a particular area, and those specialties feature English that’s heavily populated with Latin- and Greek-originated words. For example, there might be a “thoracic” specialist focusing on the torso — that specialty comes from “thorax”, which comes from the Greek word for the breastplate part of a suit of armor. An Continue reading
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The wisdom in words
It’s pretty conventional, in mainline western-civilization thinking at least, to have a high regard for the combination of knowledge and judgment we’d call “wisdom.” In fact, if you were to rate English words by their positive connotation for most people, “wisdom” would probably come out somewhere near the top of the list. At least so Continue reading
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What a coincidence
Have you ever thought about how people might seem to fall into a few types, psychologically speaking? If so, you may have experienced the synchronicity of connecting with the collective unconscious, where the ideas of Carl Jung resonate. Especially today, the anniversary of his birth in 1875 in Switzerland. Jung was one of the first Continue reading
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July 26
In 1921, the Laugh-O-Gram Studio opened in Kansas City, Missouri. It produced animated films from the second floor of a nondescript brick building on East 31st Street — the building is still standing, and you’d never give it a second look, unless you already knew about its history. The studio had a contract for making Continue reading
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Don’t go there
Eponyms are words that come from someone’s name. “Flack” is an eponym because it came from Gene Flack. “Dickens”, as in the somewhat old fashioned “oh he’s just a little dickens,” is not an eponym; “dickens” was a synonym for “devil” a couple of centuries ago. But “boycott,” refusing to engage in commerce for some Continue reading
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Just walk away, Renee
Some time ago — and by “some time” I mean roughly a century and a half and more — if you were going to walk somewhere fairly distant you might say you were going to “ride shank’s mare” or “shank’s pony.” “Shank” means shin, and the expression came out of Scotland sometime in the 1700s. Continue reading
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George Peele
Today is quite possibly the anniversary of the birth of George Peele, who may have written a number of famous plays in 1500s England, may have collaborated with Shakespeare, and might have written a play that Shakespeare used as a basis for the play King John. Peele might have had red hair. He might have 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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