Archive for 1998
Here are the originals of the Chaucer and Shakespeare quotations I mangled: Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in swich licour Of which vertu engendred is the flour; Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth Inspired hath in every holt and […]
Few modern writers would dream of submitting a manuscript without running it through a spellchecker first. Alas, in olden days, many famous writers had no access to computers, and were thus forced to submit manuscripts rife with typos and idiosyncratic spellings. Publishers were often lax in those days and failed to notice the blatant spelling […]
Stacey points out that a doctor is one who doctors, and an engineer is one who engineers. She adds: My mother tells me of an infamous familial Scrabble game in which my great uncle tried to get away with adding the "re" prefix to the word "zoom" on the table, producing "'rezoom'...to zoom more than […]
In many cases a verb x has a corresponding noun (often formed by adding "-er" or "-or" to the verb) meaning "one who does x." For instance, the verb "to spoil" corresponds to the noun "spoiler," meaning "one who spoils." Thus, it seems reasonable to assume that to find out what a "burglar" does, one […]
It's been a full year since I started doing these columns.... Time flies. To accompany you into the new year, here are a couple of miscellaneous alphabetic amusements. What comes next in the following series of names? Partial credit for getting the initial letter right. Wawona Vicente Ulloa Taraval Santiago Rivera Quintara Pacheco Ortega Noriega […]