Category: Worth 1000 Pictures
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Two Words: Preferred Pronouns
A while back I wrote about the “singular they” as used in contexts like the following: “If anyone has parked their car in the fire lane, they should move it.” “Someone finished off the banana pudding. Let’s hope they enjoyed it.” Quick recap: In such instances, we’re using the singular “they” (or perhaps relatives like…
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Two Words: Shuffle Diagram
It’s easy to invent stuff. The tricky part is coming up with things that haven’t already been invented by someone else. I accepted this reality a long time ago. It therefore didn’t faze me to learn that my latest invention – the shuffle diagram – is old hat. Not only are shuffle diagrams already all…
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One Word: Anachronism
An anachronism is something that doesn’t fit, time-wise or date-wise — a chronological inconsistency. It derives from the Greek “ana” (against) and “chronos” (time). It’s something appearing in, or being attributed to, a period other than that to which it belongs. Visualize, for example, a replica of that famous painting of George Washington crossing the…
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Three Little Words: A, I, O
Recently I wrote about the word a, some features of which fascinate me. One point I neglected to mention: Alphabetically, it’s the very first single-letter word in English. Which raises a question. (I still can’t bring myself to say “begs a question”, even though descriptive lexicons now sanction this usage.) Said question is, how many…
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Two Words: Of
Not literally two words. Just the one word — “of” — used in two different senses. Both jangling. At least to me! Recently I’ve been hearing statements like “I missed that bullseye ‘cause I’m not that good of a sharpshooter.” And there was the case of a minor soap star confessing, “I’m not that good…
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Two Words: Crevice/Crevasse
These look like alternate spellings of the same word. But they aren’t. To be sure, they have similar meanings and similar pronunciations. I’ve always assumed they meant the same. I was mistaken. Here’s the scoop: The other night, at maybe 3 am, I was proofreading the all-new digital version of my 1998 book, The Metropolis…
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One Southern Word: Ratback
A few years ago, there was an upsurge of interest in “how to talk Southern”. You could buy books on the language, maybe listen to podcasts. They’d teach you things like the Southern definition of “ah”. In case you’ve forgotten, “ah” (in Southern-speak) has two meanings. In one sense, it refers to yourself as a…
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Three Words: Another Think Coming (or is it “Thing”?)
Can common usage of a common word like “thing” be wrong — even when it’s grammatically correct? This question pesters people like me, worrying as we do about whether grammar “rules” should be prescriptive or descriptive. For some time lately, I’ve been hearing the expression “another thing coming”. As in: “If Hawkeye thinks it’ll be…
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Two Words: A & Apart
The word “a” has several notable features. It’s classified grammatically as an indefinite article. This means it refers to something of which there can be more than one. For example, we’d speak of “a” tall building because there are lots of tall buildings. But we’d say Burj Khalifa (in Dubai) is currently “the” world’s tallest…
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One Word: Antigram
An antigram is an expression formed by rearranging the letters of another expression to mean its opposite. For example, “fluster” rearranges to spell “restful”. Other classic examples: “listen” = “silent”; “antagonist” = “not against”; “earliest” = “arise late”. The word “antigram” is short for “anti-anagram” – an anagram being any word or phrase formed by…
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One Word: So
Reader Paul Ruff notes that “so” is replacing “like” as the all-purpose, meaningless word with which to start a sentence. We used to hear conversations such as: “Like, I’m going skydiving tomorrow.” “Like, wow, that’s awesome!” “Like, without a parachute!” “Isn’t that like, dangerous?” “Like, I’m using Google Cardboard, silly.” Today it seems we’re more…
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One Word: “If” by Bread
“If” by Bread is one of those songs where the lyrics can make your head explode – if you think too hard. Songs like that, of course, we aren’t supposed to think about. We’re supposed to turn off our brains and let the words wash over us. Mostly, I do just that. Bread’s “If” is…