Archive for July, 2009
No word has any right to that many vowels. It means pregnancy fetishism....
I don't seem to have ever linked to the brilliant O Fortuna misheard lyrics video, which plays "O Fortuna" while showing what the lyrics might be. Plus visual interpretations of...
Back in the late '90s, I wrote a column on computer speech recognition. The state of the art has progressed somewhat since then. One of the new uses for the...
Ben Zimmer may have tracked down the first use of the word "Ms." Believe it or not, the word was suggested in 1901 in the Springfield, Massachusetts Sunday Republican. The...
I had previously heard of Basic English, a proposed simplified English with an 850-word core vocabulary. (In case you're curious, a Basic English website has some examples.) But I hadn't...
There's a drug called rapamycin, which is showing promising results in anti-aging studies. But that's not why I'm mentioning it here. I'm mentioning it because of this sentence from the...
I've been meaning for a while to collect in one place all the quotes from my sardonic pal Jack Mantis. Recently discovered the "pages" publishing system in Movable Type—sort of...
Ever wanted to send someone an online message spelled out in Scrabble tiles? Use Scrabble-izer! After you've Scrabble-ized your message, you can email or post the URL. For example, Bill...
You know how the Union Jack has those thin white borders on either side of each of the red stripes? Turns out there's a word for that: fimbriation, adding thin...
Three times in the past two or three days, I've heard people say "deets" for "details." And what they tell you three times is true, so I guess it must...