-
The blessing of the boats
How are church buildings and governments like boats? Because of the words, of course! Not all the words. But there are some unexpected crossovers. For example, take “nave.” It’s the main part of a church, where all the pews are (if there are pews, of course). It’s from the Latin “navis,” which means ship, and… Continue reading
-
Mrs. Hudson’s Tenant
On May 22, 1859, the game was afoot. The author of the series of stories about Professor Challenger and Brigadier Gerard was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. The family was poor, but the author was supported by wealthy uncles and sent to private school at the age of nine. Then he attended Stonyhurst College, which had… Continue reading
-
Sardoodledum
In 1895 George Bernard Shaw wrote an article for the Saturday Review in which he talked about a play entitled Fedora. That play, by the way, is where the “fedora hat” got its name. Shaw was not very impressed by the play. In fact, he hated it, even though it starred the then-famous actress Sarah… Continue reading
-
Watch your Ps and Qs
Etiquette is a set of rules for general politeness. As was put down in 1998: “Blowing one’s nose..is..set within a taken-for-granted set of social procedures and etiquette.” As you can probably tell from the spelling, “etiquette” entered English from French, and not that long ago as words go — probably in the early 1700s. But the… Continue reading
-
Sandy Douglas and OXO
Enjoy computer games? They’ve been around longer than you think. In fact, they’ve almost certainly been around longer than you! The first graphic computer game was OXO (a version of tic-tac-toe, or noughts and crosses), and Alexander Douglas created it in 1952. Alexander “Sandy” Douglas was born May 21, 1921 in London. He evidently had… Continue reading
-
The Hooded Claw
You can live in a neighborhood. Part of life is childhood. You can utter a falsehood. You can wear a hood. You can open the hood of your car (or, if you’re driving a convertible in England, you can put the hood up or down). If your childhood goes badly in a bad neighborhood and… Continue reading
-
Emile Berliner
Thomas Edison is credited with inventing the phonograph in the late 1870s, and Alexander Graham Bell made it an actually useful device, but it still had some issues. Both Edison and Bell used cylinders for the recording medium. These worked fine, but were difficult to manufacture in large quantities, and as you can see from… Continue reading
-
Egg-zactly
Word of the day: egging Something that happens on Halloween is “egging” — pelting a car or house with eggs in order to create a mess and play a prank. It can also happen in a theater, or at least it used to; when a performer was particularly bad, the audience might throw eggs. Rotten… Continue reading
-
The viscosity of cruelty
One of the problems with similar, easily-confused words is that the more we rely on spell checkers, the more susceptible we are to mixing them up without noticing. Spell checkers at least notify you when you make a spelling mistake, and probably just fix it for you. But when you use a word — which… Continue reading
-
Jingoism? Bunkum.
The January, 1881 issue of Gentleman’s Magazine thought it would be helpful to explain that “We call it Jingoism in England; in France it is called Chauvinism; and in the United States, Bunkum.” Interesting, at least, that both “jingoism” and “chauvinism” are still in use, but the US alternative — or at least what Gentleman’s Magazine thought… 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!
Privacy policy
No trackers, no ads, no data collected or saved.
Contact
peterharbeson@me.com