Archive for February, 1997
Dominus wrote, quite a long time ago, to note that most of his contributions to the homomorphs list come from the American Heritage Dictionary, which uses a special notation to mark "[w]ords that are identical in spelling but whose meanings and etymologies have little, if anything, in common." (This notation is used whether or not […]
An English teacher once told me that in Chaucer's day the word "venerie" referred to matters involving either hunting or love; and that by saying the Monk "lovede venerie," Chaucer definitely meant he was both a hunter and a lover. I eventually discovered that that statement may be somewhat inaccurate; the modern word "venery" can […]
I used to think everyone knew how to play Ghost, but that turns out not to be the case. So here's an explanation of the game before I get into variants: The game of Ghost involves spelling a word, with each player in turn adding a letter to a growing word. The object is to […]
Kendra notes (regarding "It Tango II") that "not only did it happen on Thursday, but it [also] happened one night." To which I add that it happened one day, and it happened one Christmas, and it happened to one man. For some reason all of those ended up in my outtakes file—I think I was […]
The entry for 3 December in Another Almanac of Words at Play is a quasi-story called "What They Did," by Freddy Bosco, consisting of selected book titles beginning with "They." That piece was in the back of my mind one day when I heard Arthur reading aloud a series of movie titles from a movies-on-video […]
Tamara Munzner mentions a sung vocal warmup done in rehearsals for musicals. The lyrics go: Many mumbling mice Were making midnight music in the moonlight Mighty nice (I'm leaving out the tune for now, but repetitions of the verse start a half-step higher each time through.) Now that I think about it, I believe the […]
Words can be tricky things to say. They get tangled around and come out all wrong if you're not careful, and sometimes even if you are. Which is why actors and others who perform using their voices do enunciation exercises to warm up their vocal apparatus. The most famous such exercise is probably the rhyme […]