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Q: I was reading an op-ed that had this quote from Abraham Lincoln’s Cooper Union Address: “That is cool.” At first I thought it was satire, but he did indeed [...]
Q: Here’s the title of a post on a blog I follow: “More osculation of religion by the NYT and Free Press.” I’m not aware of this figurative use of [...]
Q: Can euphemisms turn into dysphemisms and vice versa? If yes, why does it happen? A: Yes, euphemisms can turn into dysphemisms, and vice versa. The change from a euphemism [...]
Q: Was it ever normal to rhyme “misery” and “high”? I’m thinking of a couplet (“Make safe the way that leads on high, / And close the path to misery”) [...]
Q: I saw this headline over an NPR article: “VP Vance tries to progress Gaza ceasefire.” Is that a permissible use of “progress”? I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen it [...]
Q: I say “fetch” when I want my Lab, Gracie, to retrieve something, but “fetching” may refer to her good looks as well as her retrieving. Am I right to [...]
Q: I’ve been hearing the word “hopium” used for an imaginary opiate taken to achieve unrealistic optimism, and “copium” used for one taken to endure hard times. I don’t see [...]
Q: After reading your recent article about Hank Stram’s coining a football sense of “matriculate,” I remembered reading a long way back that Stram also coined “Super Bowl.” A: No, [...]
[Note: In observation of Christmas week, we’re republishing a post that originally appeared on Dec. 23, 2022.] Q: Which is the more traditional version of this Christmas carol: “God Rest [...]
Q: I thought I might further muddy the waters of the wonderful word featured in your post about “dasn’t.” I once saw it defined as a contraction of “darest not,” [...]
Q: I was catching up with The Wire, the TV crime series. In episode one of season five, originally aired in 2008, editors at The Baltimore Sun tell a reporter [...]
Q: I’ve been noticing lately the strange use of “went to go” to form the past tense, as in “went to go see a movie,” “went to go swim,” and [...]
Q: Why did grammatical gender ever develop in the first place, and to what purpose? English lost it centuries ago, apparently to no ill effect. A: Grammatical gender, a system for [...]
Q: Do you think “you and I” should be “you and me” in the first part of Genesis 31:44 (English Standard Version): “Come now, let us make a covenant, you [...]
Q: In the class-conscious Sussex, England, of the 1950s, my mother would label certain people at the village Women’s Institute “not quite quite.” What is the history of this usage? [...]
Q: When I hear football sportscasters state that Team 1 has “matriculated” the football down the field, I (perhaps smugly) question whether the sportscasters have ever matriculated themselves. A: Standard dictionaries [...]
Q: My daughter and I were watching a DVD of the 1942 Disney film Bambi when I thought of this question: Is the verb “fawn” (to show affection or flatter) [...]
Q: What is the meaning of “smack” in a sentence like “it smacked of bigotry”? A: When something “smacks of bigotry,” it has a trace or a suggestion of bigotry, [...]
Q: The expression “as I alluded to earlier” has been rife amongst sports broadcasters and now seems to have spread beyond that sphere. Is the use of “allude” for a [...]
Q: I saw this sentence the other day in Two Faced Murder, a 1946 mystery by Jean Leslie: “The professor is yclept Peter, and I hate to have him called Pete.” What’s [...]
I just rewatched The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance after decades, and it was just as good (and cynical) as I remembered — I especially enjoyed Edmond O’Brien as Dutton [...]
I will not say James Willis’s “The Science of Blunders: Confessions of a Textual Critic” is the best thing ever written about textual criticism; that would be absurd, since I’ve [...]
I’m stealing ShooBoo’s MeFi post, title and all (it means ‘Irishman in space’), because I can’t improve on it: Manannán, written in 1940 by Máiréad Ní Ghráda is an Irish-language [...]
This is one of those words I thought I knew, but it turns out I had only a partial view of. My wife and I were watching the making-of extra [...]
I was intrigued by Martin Haspelmath’s Facebook post: What’s the most user-friendly corpus site? Maybe Abdulaev et al. (2022)’s corpus of the Dagestanian language Tsez (78 texts, almost 5000 text [...]
From the home page: “Starobulgarska Literatura” (“Medieval Bulgarian Literature”) is a specialized peer-reviewed journal dedicated to medieval Bulgarian literature and culture and their Byzantine and European contexts. Since Medieval Bulgarian [...]
1) Jeanna Smialek, “What French Romance Novels Could Tell Us About A.I. and Translation Jobs” (NY Times, Feb. 15, 2026; archived): The European Union, with its 27 nations and two [...]
Hermione Lee’s NYRB review (February 12, 2026 issue; archived) of Francesca Wade’s new life of Gertrude Stein starts with a pleasing quotation: As part of her account of how amazingly [...]
From Laurence Anthony’s Website (“Welcome to AntLab! This site showcases my various software tools, publications, and presentations”) comes WordFamilyFinder: “Look up words in the 30 baseword lists (and 4 supplementary [...]
Yiddish Empowerment Coach has an interesting Facebook post: What if I told you that sometimes, transliteration is more authentic than using the alef-beys? We’re often taught that “real” Yiddish lives [...]
Margherita Bassi reports for Smithsonian magazine on another remarkable development in decipherment: A little more than a thousand years ago, monks at Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt’s Sinai desert removed [...]
Natasha Wimmer’s lengthy NYRB review essay on Alejo Carpentier (February 22, 2024; archived) has some good Hattic material near the start: The historical novels that make up most of his [...]
I found Wouter J. Hanegraaff’s Facebook post extraordinarily depressing; I’ll reproduce it here (apart from the photos, which show lots of empty shelves) so you can be depressed too (or [...]
I have always vaguely wondered how far back that famous phrase goes, and Dave Wilton has done the relevant spadework at Wordorigins: The phrase take me to your leader is [...]
Nicholas Andresen’s recent post annoys me somewhat because (like almost everyone else) he writes as if “AI” were some kind of “conscious” “agent” that does things with purpose (it starts [...]
I’ve praised Tessa Hadley many times at LH (e.g., last year), and I’m going to do so again; her latest New Yorker story, “The Quiet House” (archived), is every bit [...]
If you want to blow your wig, cast your pies on the Hepcats Jive Talk Dictionary (1945): In the old days the people greeted a new ruler with the cry: [...]
I was reading Mary M. Wiles’ Interview with Jacques Rivette (yes, I’m still on my Rivette kick; I recently saw his late sort-of-thriller Secret défense and posted a rant about [...]
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