somehow or rather

I recently came across the phrase somehow or rather. I initially assumed that it was a typo for somehow or other, but I got curious and did a web search and found that lots of people have used the phrase online. I assume that it’s an eggcorn, but if so, it seems to be a […]

macrodactylous misarchism

A piece of spam email that got past my spam filters the other day included a link to a web page that had the filename macrodactylous_misarchism.html. I suspect that the filename was generated by software that took two random words and strung them together; sadly, there don’t seem to be any web pages that are […]

medakdek

I just came across the word medakdek (which is also spelled medakdeik and m'dakdeik), a Hebrew word (מדקדק) that means something like precise or exact or careful. I infer that in yeshivish (heavily jargonized English as used at US yeshivas and among their alumni) there is a connotation of fussiness, of being overly picky about […]

weblog

I recently saw the word weblog in a Bruce Sterling story (“Black Swan”) that was published in 2009. Which surprised me, because even I, who disliked the word blog for a long time, was writing blog casually by 2002, and I think of Sterling as having been usually somewhere near the cutting edge of the […]

BLUF

According to Wikipedia: BLUF (bottom line up front) […] is a paragraph where the conclusions and recommendations are placed at the beginning of the text, rather than the end, in order to facilitate rapid decision making. Which seems to me to be pretty much the same approach that a lot of people take by writing […]

l’Hexagone

According to Wikipedia, l’Hexagone (“the Hexagon”) is a casual synonym for the mainland part of Metropolitan France […], for its approximate shape, and the adjective hexagonal may be a casual synonym of French (usually understood as metropolitan only, except in topics related to the foreign affairs and national politics of France as a whole).