Archive for October, 2009
The Telegraph recently featured a list of top 10 Internet "laws", starting of course with Godwin's Law. Sure enough, there at #4 is Skitt's Law, a.k.a. Muphry's Law (sic), a.k.a....
The other day, I read a submission that included the phrase "Axis Mundi." There were a lot of other unfamiliar phrases in the story, so I figured it was just...
"Esculent" is apparently a synonym for "edible." It's been appearing in print since 1626, but I only just encountered it for the first time in Wikipedia....
I continue to be intrigued by the differences between British/American English and Indian English. I also wonder regularly if some of the grammatical problems I see in submissions written by...
Recently happened across the Wikipedia article on Spanish profanity. The little I've read of it so far seems to be useful and interesting. See also the articles on Portuguese profanity,...
To "snib" a door is to fasten or bar it. Just came across it in a submission; turns out to have been used by J. M. Barrie and Arthur Conan Doyle,...
I've never previously read A Christmas Carol. Happened across it in an iPhone edition recently, discovered that it's quite short (about 30,000 words—I had always assumed it was hundreds of...
It's traditional in English to refer to ships using female pronouns. I've known that all my life, but I think this is the first time I've consciously noticed a case...
I'm pretty sure that I already knew that the Western Gorilla has the taxonomic name Gorilla gorilla (genus + species). But I don't think I knew until now that the...