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Some of the first stars
Today is the anniversary of the birthdays of not one but two major movie stars from the very early days of the US film industry. Theda Bara was born July 29, 1885, and Clara Bow was born on the same day twenty years later. Theda Bara was born Theodocia Burr Goodman, in Cincinnati in the Continue reading
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July 29
With so many people working at home and meeting over videoconferences, kids have taken a more prominent role. Maybe not as prominent as some kids in the history of July 29, though. Take the year 238 in Rome. It was July 29 when the Praetorian Guard — the secret police of the Roman Emperors (think Continue reading
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Websites for words
It’s easy to see that the way we use language changes over time. Dictionaries are one way to measure this, particularly over the long term. Compare a dictionary from a century ago to a modern version and you can see changes in meanings of words as well as changes in the words that are used Continue reading
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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
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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