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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) [...]
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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BONUS:
My Political Platform
I thought it would be fun to put it on paper to finally get it out of my system, so here’s my “enlightened libertarian moderate” platform. Basically, it’s a generous welfare state with conscription and dog-eat-dog capitalism.
Call this my 21st Century Moderately Progressive Libertarian platform.
Elect me president and I will..
Militia
– Ask not what your country can do for you
-This is the cornerstone, and would probably require a constitutional amendment. Mandatory 2-year coed military service at age 18, which includes a generous tuition for college or technical training afterward. Let’s call it Militia. You can opt-out with a hefty cash payment, or just not make it past boot camp, but you permanently lose the benefits of citizenship – the right to vote, run for public office, be on juries, and bear arms. If Militia is missed for whatever reason, citizenship could be earned later than age 18, but the financial reward would be eliminated and the length of service would be extended somewhat.
Handicapped people (or asthma, autism, etc) would go though special needs boot camps and work in support/IT.
In peacetime Militia would work in either peacekeeping operations led by the UN or NATO or work in FDR-style federal works programs and law enforcement.
Militia would solve many problems such as unnecessary wars, student debt, and youthful ennui. Also, all immigrants would be required to perform this service, even having spanish (or Cantonese!) only brigades. Quakers and others religious groups can qualify for conscientious objector status (if a nonmilitary support role isn’t peaceful enough for them) but the benefits of citizenship will be denied.
Voting and Electoral
-Eliminate the electoral college
-Massively invest into blockchain open-source election software development
Economy
-Lower corporate taxes and regulation
-Raise personal taxes, keep it progressive, eliminate all deductions
-Eliminate the minimum wage completely
-End all farm and coal subsidies
-Promote a 100% paperless cashless government
-Put reduction of our national debt as a top priority of government policy.
-Return to the gold standard, possibly somehow converting the dollar into a Bitcoin style currency
-Abolishing all corporate welfare, including the Import-Export Bank
-Abolishing all non-environmental regulation of agriculture, including subsidies. Large scale hemp cultivation re-legalized and taxed.
-Support and expand all free trade agreements.
-No corporation is too big to fail. Creative destruction must be embraced.
-Moderate slavery reparations via postgraduate degrees
Environment
-Expand environmental regulation with carbon credits; solar and wind power credits greatly expanded
-Maintain EPA at current levels. Halt Keystone.
Foreign Policy
-Stop being the global policeman – do not take sides in international conflicts, especially in the Middle East. We should have not meddled in Libya, Syria, Grenada, Iraq, Afghanistan or Vietnam – basically every conflict since Korea. This includes Israel, which although is a natural ally and is our friend and a beacon of light democracy and hope in the Middle East, is mighty enough to stand on its own. However, if Israel is ever invaded, help them to the utmost. Update 2022: EXCEPT UKRAINE!
-Push for a free Kurdistan carved from parts of Turkey Syria and Iran as a free economic zone to encourage investment to pay for reparations for surrounding governments.
-Don’t give Putin an inch.
-Be a fire breathing, drone using hawk when it comes to nukes.
-Halt all international aid programs
-Increase special ops and drone technology and expand Obama’s reliance on use of drones and Bin Laden-style assassinations.
-Close Guantanamo
Education
Encourage privatization with school choice and vouchers.
Health & Homefront
-Keep Obamacare, expand to single-payer but limit the spending for those over 65 to manageable levels commensurate to the young.
-Offer free counseling, rehab, and jobs to all drug and alcohol addicts in FDR-style federal work projects.
-Relax FDA restrictions of orphan drugs (i.e. smart drugs, performance-enhancing supplements proven to be safe)
-Legalize and normalize assisted suicide
-Expand abortion rights
-Eliminate private prisons
-Allow handguns and rifles and open carry to remain legal, but ban all assault rifles, increase screening, increase penalties for gun violations, offer buybacks for guns
-Legalize drugs on the federal level but offer funds for state-level enforcement. Take all savings and reinvest into drug treatment programs
Law and Order/Immigration
-Heightened sentences for violent offenders and crime in general, with financial penalties significantly increased
-Legalizing all drugs on the federal level including cocaine, meth, and heroin and immediately releasing all drug prisoners. Tax drugs. States however are free to regulate as they see fit and would play a key role in preventing a return to the Great Binge of the late 1800s.
-Offer free housing to homeless people, it’s cheaper than what we have now. Possibly put them to work with Militia
-Eliminate the death penalty, which while deeply gratifying from a social vengeance perspective has frankly proven to be too costly and sometimes we killed the wrong guy.
-Relaxing gun control laws, but requiring insurance.
-Beefing up federal internet law enforcement, possibly a whole new Federal Internet Crime bureau
-Expand immigration for those with high-tech skills
-Make Militia mandatory for able-bodied immigrants for citizenship. Immigrants who do any crime within 10 years of military service get deported and recorded into an expanded national database.
-Rather than focus on keeping immigrants out, I would focus on making them prefer their own neighboring countries. Militia can help them on public projects, schools hospitals, and crime control.
-Work more with local churches and synagogues in sponsoring persecuted Christians, Jews, Sikhs, Muslims, etc.
I wouldn’t have a chance of winning… “Hi, elect me, I’m gonna put all you Millennials in boot camps.”
Infographics
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