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Q: In Jen Beagin’s 2023 novel Big Swiss, Flavia asks Om, her sex therapist, whether “adult” and “adultery” are related. He says they aren’t. Huh? Could that be right? A: Yes. [...]
Q: Having been sucked down many a “rabbit hole” in my reading, I’m wondering how this figurative sense of the phrase developed. Did it appear before Alice in Wonderland was [...]
Q: I am wondering how chimera has come to mean both “an imaginary monster compounded of incongruous parts” and “an unrealizable dream.” A: When “chimera” originally appeared in ancient Greece as [...]
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) [...]
Min Chen writes for Artnet about an exhibition at Yale Library (is that what they’re calling Sterling Memorial now?) I’d love to see: James Joyce’s modernist epic Ulysses arrived in [...]
It’s always nice to discover a blogging linguist I hadn’t known about [actually I had; see below]; Danny L. Bate (“Linguist, broadcaster, writer, cat fanatic”) has been doing it since [...]
I expect DE will have something to say about this: Kye Kye Kule is a call-and-response song performed in several African countries. The actions of this song are reminiscent of [...]
Colin Gorrie posts thus at Dead Language Society: A man takes a train from London to the coast. He’s visiting a town called Wulfleet. It’s small and old, the kind [...]
OK, it’s not actually linguistics (just another dumb headline), but come on, “Super-salty pizza sends six kids to the hospital in Japan, linguistics blamed” (by Casey Baseel, SoraNews24) is a [...]
John Gallagher, the author of Learning Languages in Early Modern England, has a very informative LRB review (archived) of two books on the transmission of information in Early Modern Europe, [...]
Out of the blue I remembered a phrase my mother was fond of — she’d often say things like “He was holding it right in his hot little hands” — [...]
Mariona Miret interviews a remarkable man: Fredo Valla has dedicated his life to defending the Occitan language and spreading its history. This year, 2024, he received the Robèrt Lafont Award [...]
Paul Lukas’s H-Bomb: A Frank Lloyd Wright Typographic Mystery will be of interest to anyone with even a casual interest in typefaces; it’s well-written, suspenseful, and amusing. I got to [...]
Granta magazine has an online series, Mark Up, for which they “invited writers to tell us their thoughts on punctuation and grammar”; so far, though, the only one that seems [...]
I love a good technical discussion of anything connected with language, so I enjoyed Timothy Linward’s Wargamer post Meet the mom and pop duo bringing Japan’s D&D killer, Sword World, [...]
An interesting NY Times piece by Sarah Chatta (archived): Millions of banned books were smuggled into the Soviet Union in the 20th century — often in small batches, hidden in [...]
As a Laurence Sterne fan of long standing (see my reveling in A Sentimental Journey in 2012 and my description the following year of his influence on Russian lit: “both [...]
David S. Reynolds’ NYRB review (February 22, 2024; archived) of Sensationalism and the Jew in Antebellum American Literature by David Anthony provides repellent instances of “hostile portraits of Jews in [...]
Matthew Scarborough, LH’s house Indo-Europeanist (e.g.), has a new project going, which I’ll let him introduce: A small project that I’ve started doing for fun – and to be frank [...]
As I said here, my wife and I are reading Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, and I’ve gotten to another passage of sufficient Hattic interest to post. One of the protagonists [...]
Via Pengio’s MeFi post on the 30th anniversary of Trainspotting, “the intro to Glaswegian slang that is Modern Toss’s Periodic Table of Swearing (The Scottish Field Report).” It goes from [...]
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