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Adam Ferguson
If you remember your European history from middle or high school (or both), you’ll know that the “Age of Enlightenment” was not about dieting and weight loss, it was an intellectual movement in the 17th and 18th centuries. It focused on rationalism and gaining knowledge empircally. Although the Enlightenment applies to Europe overall, the movement… Continue reading
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Teetotal
Word of the day: teetotal There was a temperance movement in the early 1800s in England, and it spread to the US by the 1820s. Before that, alcohol was widely used as a beverage, a medicine, and even, in the case of beer, nourishment. Water was often unsafe to drink, and other beverages (milk, for… Continue reading
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Mary Tenney Gray
In the 1800s in the US, women were evidently getting fed up with well-off white men hogging all the power and authority and refusing to share their privileges, such as education and voting. But a group that doesn’t have any formal power often faces significant hurdles in trying to change the status quo. The women… Continue reading
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1982
An interesting approach to looking at word origins is to start with a year instead of a word. The Oxford English Dictionary very helpfully provides a list of the words first cited in a particular year. Let’s try 1982. That was the year that Tylenol laced with potassium cyanide killed seven people in and around… Continue reading
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Tabloid
You hear — usually in competing media — about “tabloid journalism” and “the tabloids.” But doesn’t “tabloid” seem like a weird word for a kind of newspaper? That’s because it is — and it originally meant something very different. It all started back in 1880 in London. Henry Wellcome started a business with Silas Burroughs:… Continue reading
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Theodor Nelson
I’m sure you’re familiar with the terms hypertext and hypermedia. They’re older than you might expect; they were both coined in 1963 by Theodor (Ted) Nelson, whose 87th birthday is today. Nelson came up with the terms in connection with Project Xanadu, his plan for a networked computer-based writing system that would enable connecting (linking)… Continue reading
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Not so much
If you’re fond of both language and math, you surely already know that in the phrase “5 minus 3” the number 5 is the minuend and the number 3 is the subtrahend. Since that’s not news, it’s a good thing that 5 less 3 is not really the subject of this bit of trivia. No,… Continue reading
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Wilbert Awdry
The Box Tunnel is a railroad tunnel in England. It was designed by the famous engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel and constructed between 1838 and 1841. It’s nearly two miles long, which made it the world’s longest railway tunnel when it opened. It was originally a controversial project, partly because the rock inside Box Hill wasn’t… Continue reading
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Anfractuousity
Back in 1596, a guy named Peter Lowe wrote: “The vayne goeth aboue the artier, but not right lyne as other parts doe, but in anfractuosities, like unto a Woodbine.” A woodbine, by the way, is a vine (or “vayne”). What he’s saying, using plenty of words, is that a vine doesn’t grow in a… 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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