Just saw someone on a BoardGameGeek forum use the phrase “I am in the same shoe with you,” which I don’t recall ever encountering before. I like it—it was immediately clear what it means—but now I’m curious about it. A Google search for [“same shoe with you”] shows only about 13,000 instances of that phrase […]
I’ve known maybe six or eight other people named Jed in my life, but all of them have been (as far as I know) male. Today I learned that Jed can also be a woman’s name. In 1993, a John le Carré novel called The Night Manager included a woman named Jed—a nickname for Jemima. […]
The TV show 1899 is one of those shows where everything is Mysterious. In particular, the music and sounds effects are very very Mysterious. Which of course means that the captions have to convey how Mysterious the sounds are. Fortunately, the captioners were up to the task. Below is a list of about thirty captions […]
The noun form, according to the OED, is condignity, although Johnson lists condignness.
I just read a quote from a book review that included the phrase “complex characters trying to make sense of their worlds, their pasts, and their dreams.” But I misread pasts as pasta. And for a moment there, it seemed perfectly reasonable to me that trying to make sense of their pasta might be something that […]
Today I learned that people whose job was to align the type bars in typewriters (during manufacture) used this quasi-sentence to test the alignment: Amaranath sasesusos Oronoco initiation secedes Uruguay Philadelphia An explanation, from Darren Wershler-Henry’s 2005 book The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting: “Amaranath,” the misspelled name of an imaginary flower, checks […]
Headline: Man who ran across Highway 85 to receive mental health resources, Mountain View police say The first two or three times I read that, I assumed there was a verb missing, and I wondered why someone would run across the freeway in order to get mental health services. Then I figured out what it […]
According to Wikipedia: Yan Tan Tethera […] is a sheep-counting system traditionally used by shepherds in Northern England and some other parts of Britain. The words are numbers taken from Brythonic Celtic languages such as Cumbric which had died out in most of Northern England by the sixth century, but they were commonly used for […]
Just got curious about the word motorcade, and was surprised by a couple of things in its etymology: I was thinking it might be short for something like motorcar parade, to account for that c in the middle. Turns out motorcade is more or less from motor cavalcade. It had never occurred to me that […]
My dictionary’s definition for nutritious just says: : NOURISHING If I follow the link on that definition, it takes me to the definition of nourishing, which just says: : giving nourishment : NUTRITIOUS