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Johann Becher
If you had been a resident of Speyer in the mid 1600s, you would probably have known about Johann Joachim Becher, who was the leading intellectual of that area. The city of Speyer is still around, and now it’s in Germany. When Becher was born, on May 6, 1635, it was in the Holy Roman… Continue reading
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“You’ve got a pink kink in your think”
When you’re feeling “in the pink”, that means you’re in excellent health and feeling fine. In his 1923 novel Inimitable Jeeves, P.G. Wodehouse used it this way: “‘I am in excellent health, I thank you. And you?’ ‘In the pink. Just been over to America.’” The first one to use “pink” in this sense was… Continue reading
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The color of…
In 1931, the Commission internationale de l’éclairage (International Commission on Illumination or “CIE”), created the CIE 1931 XYZ Color Space. It’s a way of plotting colors by their wavelengths in the visible (to humans) spectrum, and is still in use as the basis for describing (and matching) specific colors when you’re working with, say, ink,… Continue reading
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Calling a phon a phon
In many books — the old kind, actually printed in real ink on real paper — there’s a page near the end that tells you some things about the book itself. Sometimes it lists the typefaces used, occasionally the paper, and maybe even some of the people involved in creating the book, such as the… Continue reading
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But what about cats?
English is sort of a sponge among languages. English words are borrowed from just about all other languages. “Sponge,” by the way, comes originally from Greek — except for the “sponge” that’s the heel part of a horseshoe; that comes from the Latin word for a supporting frame, like a bedframe. That’s what they’re talking… Continue reading
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Coincidence
Today marks a weird historical coincidence in the state of Idaho in the US. It all started in 1942, in the small town of Caldwell. Clement Leroy Otter was born there on May 3. His father was a sort of traveling electrician, and the family moved around quite a lot. Otter attended no fewer than… Continue reading
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Mr. Smith goes to…Mars?
If you love good old-fashioned space opera stories where scientifically ridiculous space ships engage in ray-gun-powered dogfights in interstellar space, today is a good day to celebrate. On the other hand, if you’re a casual home baker who enjoys creating cakes and pies, but uses packaged mixes because they’re so convenient, today is a good… Continue reading
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It’s too much trouble; where’s my broth?
“Gruel,” which you often read about in old stories about unfortunate waifs in nineteenth-century orphanages, turns out to be a catchall term for various kinds of broth. It could be anything from boiled oatmeal to thin soup. It was served in orphanages, and also to people suffering from various illnesses. But “gruel” is a light,… Continue reading
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On second thought, make it a small
If languages can be said to have sizes, English is clearly one of the jumbos. Maybe the biggest, largest, greatest, most enormous, sizable, grandest, most immense, massive, gigantic, grand, and generous jumbo of them all. It’s got hundreds of thousands of words, after all. One way it got so big is by having multiple words… 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