Words & Stuff

According to Wikipedia, “Blackacre, Whiteacre, Greenacre, Brownacre, and variations are the placeholder names used” by law professors and on law exams to discuss fictitious property.

According to David Darling’s website: SNC meteorites are a group of [meteorites] thought to have come from the surface of Mars and named after the initials of the places where the first three were found: Shergotty, India in 1865, Chassigny, France in 1815, and Nahkla, Egypt in 1911. The SNC subgroups are the shergottites, nakhlites, […]

I was today years old, as the kids say, when I learned that the formal and former name of the melon baller is the parisienne scoop.  Balls cut from fruits or vegetables are parisiennes.

Not entirely sure that's how it ought to be spelled, though.

As a middle-aged person with teenagers, I occasionally run up against language that Kids These Days are using.  Yesterday, I learned “groutfit” when another mom posted on Facebook that her son came home wearing someone else’s shirt: he was mocked for wearing a groutfit, so he traded shirts with a friend. A “groutfit” is a […]

No, I will not attempt to use the word in conversation, but I love it anyway.

Back in 2012, I wrote an entry about encountering the word arsy-tansy in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and discovering that that term didn’t exist anywhere else. Just now, I came across the word arsy-versy in an Anthony Boucher story, “The Chronokinesis of Jonathan Hull.” (“The disturbingly arsy-versy normal world…”) It turns […]

Standover tactics require a standover man. Or a standover woman, of course. A standover person of any kind. Or perhaps a standover kangaroo would do, I'm not sure about all of these antipodean nuances.

My dictionary says that shagreen is a kind of untanned leather (by which it presumably means rawhide), or “the rough skin of various sharks and rays.” Wikipedia says that shagreen is a kind of rawhide, from a horse or a shark or a ray. (I’m paraphrasing.) Both indicate that the word derives from the French […]