Words & Stuff

I recently encountered a political article that contrasted the classes against the masses. At first I assumed there was a word missing—maybe the writer meant upper classes? But a bit of research revealed to me that the word classes by itself has long been used to refer to the upper class, especially in contrast to […]

According to Wikipedia: In biology, a tribe is a taxonomic rank above genus, but below family and subfamily. I don’t think I had ever encountered that meaning of the word tribe before. That Wikipedia article also says that in zoology, tribe names tend to end in -ini and subtribe names tend to end in -ina, […]

In the webcomic Strong Female Protagonist, the word biodynamic essentially means “having superpowers.” So I was startled just now to see a reference to biodynamic apples. Turns out that, according to Wikipedia: Biodynamic agriculture is a form of alternative agriculture very similar to organic farming, but it includes various esoteric concepts drawn from the ideas […]

Apropros of nothing.

I was vaguely aware of the word struthious as relating to ostriches, but I don’t think I had previously encountered it used metaphorically. Damon Knight, in his essay in Clarion II, wrote: Wollheim alludes to this episode in a typically struthious way[…] From context, I’m assuming that Knight meant that Wollheim had his head in […]

I knew there was one t, but not y. Er, why.

There will be a lot of hot takes tomorrow.

Just looked at the list of ingredients for a skin lotion; the first ingredient listed was “aqua.” I figured it probably referred to water, but I’m not used to water being called anything other than water in ingredients lists, so I poked around a little further. Turns out it’s not at all unusual, according to […]