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All mixed up
Amid the chaos of everyday life, it’s common to mistake one word for another, or to think that two words might be related even though they aren’t. And the way English works, if enough people make the same mistake, it’s not really a mistake any more and ends up memorialized in the dictionary. “Chaos” is… Continue reading
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Christopher Cockerell
There’s a clever vehicle you can ride in and even, if you want, own and drive yourself. It doesn’t have wheels. No tank treads either. It doesn’t float in water. It doesn’t fly. But despite all that it can travel over any terrain and over water. And the very first one was made out of… Continue reading
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“Dynasty,” but not in Dallas
Family dynasties can be very powerful and enduring organizations. A good example is the Medici family of Florence several centuries ago. It’s so long ago that nobody knows all the details, but one of the major factors in their ascendance was the Medici Bank. Giovanni de’ Medici founded it around 1397, and it became the… Continue reading
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I’ll be on the deck
In about the middle of the 1700s in England, two architectural styles became very popular. One was gothic, and the other could be best described as sort of fake Chinese. That is, buildings, bridges, and the like were designed to look like they were from China, to people who had never been to China. In… Continue reading
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Dwile flonking
Any number of words and phrases have entered English from various sports, from being “on deck” meaning the next in line (that’s from baseball) to loads of others. But other words have stayed within the confines of their respective games. In some cases this is probably a good thing. Take, for example, the words “jobanowl,”… Continue reading
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Egg-zactly
In William Caxton’s 1490 translation of the “Aeneid” (specifically in the prologue), there is this line: “Loo, what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte, egges, or eyren? Certaynly it is hard to playse every man, by-cause of dyversite and chaunge of langage.” The line illustrates a controversy of the time: which word was going to… Continue reading
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A good egg
If you’ve been to (or live in) the midwestern section of the US, you’ve probably seen or even visited a Bob Evans restaurant. As you might expect, the restaurants are named after the founder, Bob Evans, who was born May 30, 1918. Evans didn’t originally set out to be a restauranteur; he was a farmer.… Continue reading
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Who needs more than 3 letters
Most obscure words are sesquipedalian — that is, they’re long, multisyllabic constructions that might just be obscure because most people can’t remember them. Surely there can’t be very many extremely short words — say, just three letters — that most people haven’t heard of? Well…let’s have a look. Some short words have to do with… Continue reading
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Stuff overboard!
It’s not unusual to see the phrase “flotsam and jetsam” used just like it was in 1884: “A mania for buying all sorts of flotsam and jetsam.” That’s always the phrase, in that order. “Jetsam and flotsam” just wouldn’t sound the same. And you hardly ever see “flotsam” without “jetsam,” even though they’re really not the same… 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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