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Humor but not comedy
When you’re feeling hopeful or optimistic about something you might say you’re feeling “sanguine” about it. If you’re like most people, you probably wouldn’t, but the point is that you could. “Sanguine” is a reasonably common word, although it doesn’t generally pop up in everyday conversation in most circles. But it has a pretty unusual… Continue reading
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Just the latest-fashion
There’s an amusing cycle in English; sometimes a two-word phrase (for example, ice cream) for some reason acquires a hyphen for a while (ice-cream). Then the hyphen seems too fussy and troublesome, so it’s dropped completely and becomes a single compound word (icecream). After another while, the words separate again and the original two-word phrase… Continue reading
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Venetia Burney
Today is the 106th anniversary of the birth of Venetia Katharine Douglas Burney, who was born in Banstead, England. She came from an educated family; her father was a professor at Oxford, her grandfather was the librarian at the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and her uncle was Science Master at Eton. Burney studied economics, and… Continue reading
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A track on the tract
It’s not unusual to see the words “tract” and “track” confused; people use “track” where they mean “tract”, and (less often) talk about “tracts” that are really “tracks”. Maybe they shouldn’t be blamed too much, though, because the history of “track” and “tract” is pretty tangled and involves some weird coincidences. Both words appeared in… Continue reading
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Kathleen Booth
Kathleen Booth One of the founders of the digital computer era is someone you’ve likely never heard of: Kathleen Booth. She was born July 9, 1922 in Worcestershire, England and attended the University of London, where she earned undergraduate and PhD degrees in mathematics. While she was studying at the University of London she was… Continue reading
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Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin
You’ve heard of Zeppelins, the huge dirigibles that were the leading aviation machines until the Hindenberg disaster in 1937 convinced people that flying around underneath a large amount of hydrogen might not be the best idea. Oddly, although the photos are shocking, there were 97 people on board the craft and only 35 fatalities. Airliner… Continue reading
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WANTED: Doornails, dead or alive
In 1884 the “Pall Mall Gazette” opined that “The Congo treaty may now be regarded as being as dead as a doornail.” We still say “dead as a doornail” today, a century and a half later. But wait, “Piers Plowman” includes this bit: “Fey withouten fait is febelore þen nouȝt, And ded as a dore-nayl.” That’s… Continue reading
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Ojek
English borrows words from every language it touches. There are tens of thousands of words borrowed from European languages, but that’s just because of all the contact with them. Now that people can move around the world just a little more easily than months-long voyages or treks, English is continuing its borrowing ways, adopting additional… Continue reading
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Robert Ledley
Good morning! Computers are now an inextricable part of medicine. It wasn’t always that way, though. One of the leaders in using computers in medicine and biomedical research was Robert Ledley who was born June 28 in New York City. You may have heard of him; he was “the only physicist who could pull your… Continue reading
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Skinkle
Have you ever gone outside on a clear, calm night, and enjoyed looking up at the stars as they…skinkled? Or, as in an 1888 newspaper story, maybe you’ve watched “A handful of flame which..merely skinkles on the window-panes.” It’s true; in addition to twinkling, sparkling, gleaming, shimmering, flickering, glittering, winking, gleaming, scintillating, and corsuscating, objects that produce… Continue reading
About Me
I’m Pete Harbeson, a writer (among other things) located near Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to writing my own content, I’ve learned to translate for my loquacious and opinionated pup Chocolate Bossypaws. No surprise, 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. You can also find some of my minor software projects at GitHub. Nothing very impressive. I mostly write tiny utilities in Python.
I find myself suddenly de-corporatized (their choice, not mine). To help keep the lights on, buy me a coffee!
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Contact
peterharbeson@me.com