Archive for 5: lllowercase 3
A couple weeks ago, Fran Poodry asked me what was up with words that start with a silent P, and I had to confess I didn't know. (Such words include pfennig (in the American pronunciation), pneumatic, psalm, words starting with pseud-, psi, psittaform, Psmith, words starting with psych-, ptarmigan, pterodactyl, ptomaine, and so on.) The […]
The terms "jargon," "argot," "slang," and "cant" all refer to nonstandard language used by particular groups. Loosely speaking, the terms are interchangeable; if I were to make usage distinctions, I would say that "cant" most often refers to criminal slang, "jargon" to technical or professional terms, "argot" to language used only within the given group, […]
Whenever we speak, we make music. Well, okay, that's not entirely true. But in voiced (not whispered) spoken English, every speech sound has a pitch. In most utterances, the pitches stay fairly constant from one syllable to another, though pitch rises at the end of a question and falls at the end of a statement; […]
Note added in 2023: The main reason that anyone visits this page these days is to see Hartman's Law, which is way down in the final paragraph of the page. So I’m making it easier to find by copying it up here at the top of the page: Hartman's Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation: Any article […]
"Proofreading is an art and a craft." —The Chicago Manual of Style, 14th ed., example in Fig. 3.2 For the past few months I've been acting as a volunteer proofreader for a Web-based magazine. We need a way to keep proofreading consistent from story to story, for all proofreaders; the obvious solution is to create […]
Carl Muckenhoupt notes that in the line Dull, bull; Geoffrey, George ate late, "ate" is probably meant to be pronounced /Et/ rather than the more standard American /eIt/. I agree; I had been baffled by the inclusion of two rhyming words on that line, but that pronunciation makes it make sense. (Last updated: 30 March […]
Some time ago, Dominus pointed out to me that "singer," "finger," and "ginger" look like they should rhyme but have entirely different pronunciations. I was amused but didn't know what to do with that information until Jim sent me a forwarded version of the following poem. That version was titled "English Is Tough Stuff" and […]
(I was going to include a gratuitous photo of a fox trotting in this column, but the picture in question was too blurry. Instead, here's a gratuitous photo of a fox sitting still.) While doing some research on the gaits of horses recently, I came across the term "fox-trot," referring to a particular slowish gait […]
I've been a big fan of Willard R. Espy's books ever since I first encountered An Almanac of Words at Play, back in high school. I always meant to write him a letter thanking him for the books, and suggesting new material for any future ones he might write. But I never got around to […]
The characters of a writing system can be represented in many ways—not only in a variety of fonts and lettering styles, but in any agreed-upon symbolic form: as Braille letters, as flags in Semaphore, as hand-signs, or as strings of dots and dashes... Two weeks ago, Morse Code was officially retired as the language of […]