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Category archive: Language

The uses of a V

I'm playing Scrabulous again with Mary Anne. Good words so far: she led with TILDE, I countered with PORCINI, she... (More...)

Philosophy of Scrabble

At some point I'll post more about Facebook. But for now, having fallen into two Scrabulous games almost immediately upon... (More...)

Hey, all you gayelles and gayettes

Tonight I learned a new word: "gayelle." It's trying to be the new word for "lesbian"; it's a feminine form... (More...)

Name parser

Got home late last night, should've gone to bed, but instead decided to write some code. The following will probably... (More...)

Obama is in

As you probably all know by now, Barack Obama announced his candidacy for President today. I just watched the announcement... (More...)

Greek suffix meets Lingua Terra

Sometimes people complain that the word polyamory is a mix of Latin and Greek roots. I've been known to make... (More...)

Pirates

Arr, me hearties! Today was, of course, Talk Like a Pirate Day, as I'm sure you all knew. One of... (More...)

Patriotic fiction

I am not a patriot in the usual sense of the term. Humanity and the world are generally more important... (More...)

Neology feed

In case anyone's interested but missed it, Irilyth has kindly set up a LiveJournal feed for my Neology wordblog. At... (More...)

Neology

I've started a new mini-blog: Neology, in which I post words I encounter that I don't know the meanings of,... (More...)

Things that have made me laugh this morning

The morning's just barely begun, and already two things have made me laugh: (More...)

Words easily confused #16

And since I'm apparently being Writing Curmudgeon Guy lately, I think it's time for another installment of "words easily confused."... (More...)

Words easily confused #15

Time for another installment. (To see previous editions, search my journal for the phrase "words easily" (no quotes)—that'll show the... (More...)

Items: Shifting paradigms

Feeling a little better than yesterday, but still not up to going to work. Yesterday I didn't do nearly enough... (More...)

Another gender guesser

Geoff's Gender Guesser attempts to determine whether a given name is more likely a male name or a female name,... (More...)

Words easily confused (or misspelled, or not) #14

Time for another installment. (To see previous editions, search my journal for the phrase "words easily" (no quotes)—that'll show the... (More...)

Words easily misspelled #13

I know it's only been a few weeks since the last list, but shortly after I posted the last one... (More...)

Words easily misspelled #12

I've been saving these up 'til there were enough of them to post: As Heather noted in a comment to... (More...)

Words easily misused #11

I've seen two different journalers use the term potboiler correctly this morning, but I've also talked with a lot of... (More...)

Words easily confused (by Jed) #10

Half a dozen times in the last week, I've seen a reference to someone racking their brains. Each time, I've... (More...)

Gendered language

Jean pointed to The Gender Genie, where you enter some text and it applies the Koppel-Argamon algorithm (or perhaps that... (More...)

Words easily confused (that have become synonyms) #9

And then there are the words that I think are different but turn out to be acceptable variants of each... (More...)

Words easily confused (or misspelled) #8

We get an awful lot of stories in which fluorescent is misspelled florescent. Presumably partly because it's another one of... (More...)

Computer can determine author sex?

Interesting item in Nature: "Computer program detects author gender." Claim is that "[the] simple scan of key words and syntax... (More...)

Words easily confused #7

Another entry in an irregular series. skirl and swirl. Possibly because it sounds a little like swirl and a little... (More...)

Words easily confused #6

Only one item this time, but it's a remarkably common one: lightning and lightening. I suppose this should really go... (More...)

Words easily confused #5

Another entry in an irregular series. past and passed. In the context in which they're often confused, past means "beyond"... (More...)

Words easily confused #4

Only one word-pair today: The correct spelling of cell phone uses two Ls, just like a cell of the body.... (More...)

Malaprops (words easily confused #3)

More words easily confused: rein and reign. I see these confused so often that I've sometimes gotten confused about them... (More...)

Blog glossary

One last thing for tonight: in my peregrinations earlier, I chanced across the Samizdata blog glossary. I went there to... (More...)

Slink, slank, slunk (words easily confused #2)

We've had half a dozen submissions in the past couple years that include phrases of the form "[person] slunk down... (More...)

I wish I may, I wished I might (words easily confused #1)

Warning: grammar rant. Nothing to see; move along.   I've seen this at least half a dozen times in stories... (More...)

Freedom of speech

I think most Americans are unaware of the existing limitations on freedom of speech. I used to think that freedom... (More...)