Salutations!
My name is Shmuel, and I'll be your guest blogger. I'd like to thank Jed for inviting me to come and play. I'm flattered, and excited, and terribly uncertain of...
Archive for Specific Words
attosecond
I know what an attosecond is. (It's 10-18 seconds.) What surprised me was seeing the word used metaphorically and in passing in a general-interest news article: Stress may be most...
First occurrence of “Ms.”
Ben Zimmer may have tracked down the first use of the word "Ms." Believe it or not, the word was suggested in 1901 in the Springfield, Massachusetts Sunday Republican. The...
protein name
There's a drug called rapamycin, which is showing promising results in anti-aging studies. But that's not why I'm mentioning it here. I'm mentioning it because of this sentence from the...
virii
I occasionally see people use "virii" as the plural of "virus," but there's no good reason (that I know of) to do so. See Wikipedia's entry on the plural of...
Mama, momma, mom, etc
I was recently discussing various words for "mother," and it occurred to me that words/spellings like mama, momma, mom, ma, and mamma have different connotations to me. MW11 lists them...
Tweets and twits
There's been some confusion in mainstream news venues lately about Twitter-related terminology. I imagine that most of y'all who read this blog know more about Twitter than I do, but...
thrupenny bits
Just encountered a comment in an article on Britain's Got Talent that refers to "a dancer who was show[ing] her thrupennie bits to the world." Thruppence, or the threepenny bit,...
Overused book-review words
Bob Harris blogs his "Seven Deadly Words of Book Reviewing." By which he means words that appear too often in book reviews. Aside: I immediately assumed that the title was...
yam
Yams are confusing. Or at least the word is. The "true yam" is a starchy tuber that I associate with Africa. It can grow up to eight feet long, and...