Linguistics

Q: I would love to see a story on “performative gratitude,” a term for expressing gratefulness when you don’t really mean it. The usage seems to be flooding society. A: [...]

Q: I was discussing well-being this morning and wondered about its antonym. AI says “the opposite of wellbeing is often considered to be illbeing, which refers to a state of poor [...]

‘Q: I am used to reading older texts that use “my” before consonants (“my love”) and “mine” before vowels (“mine eyes”). But once in a while I see them used [...]

Q: I recently encountered a sentence about the need for “state and local leadership on immigration.” This use of “on” strikes me as lazy and inconsiderate of syntax. It’s probably [...]

Q: “Making the cut” is said to originate from golf, but it might equally be said to have its roots in early moviemaking. Which came first? A: The expression “make [...]

Q: How can we get everyone to quit using “loose” when they mean “lose”? It’s driving me insane! A: The word “lose” is usually a verb with the sense of [...]

Q: In a NY Times obituary, a historian refers to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as “arrogant, literate, obdurate, revengeful,” etc. Is it not odd to describe an Islamic scholar as “literate,” [...]

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: 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: 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 [...]

Cal Revely-Calder (who has an interesting Three Things substack) writes about faces in the New Yorker (archived); I was enjoying its brio and historical tidbits, but when I got to [...]

I liked Talia Felix’s Etymonline post about A.1. Sauce so much I thought I’d share it; it’s a nice bit of philological/historical investigation: In personal curiosity I was looking at [...]

Nitsuh Abebe’s latest “On Language” column (archived; see this post) is on the word frictionless, which is not particularly interesting in and of itself; I was skimming along: “Frictionless” used [...]

Alex Vadukul writes in the NY Times (archived) about a man who feels like a younger version of me, if I had been a yeshiva bokher: For a young Jewish [...]

Dave Wilton did a Big List post that starts: One distinction between the British and North American lexicons is the usage of biscuit and cookie. What North Americans call a [...]

I watched Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel (see this post) with great pleasure; not only is it well made (and surprisingly avant-garde for the Soviet Union of the Brezhnev era), but it’s [...]

I had no intention of doing a Fourth-themed post, but JWB slyly sent me a link to Sophie Hardach’s BBC piece “The Viking word hidden in the Declaration of American [...]

Alice Dragoon writes for MIT Technology Review about a man of many words: Brian Sietsema has a favorite word. It’s somewhat surprising that he can choose just one. He’s the [...]

A very interesting NY Times piece by Elda Cantú (archived): I have been speaking Spanish for over 40 years, and practically every day I learn a new word, an unfamiliar [...]

I’ve been a huge fan of Gary Saul Morson for a long time (see my too-brief review of his Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time here) and I’ve been [...]