Mnemonic acronyms for diving
The PADI (scuba instruction) people should hire a consultant from the medical-training industry to come up with mnemonic acronyms for their lists of “five steps to do such-and-such” or “nine...
Great Scott
An article about the origin of the phrase “Great Scott!”. Short version: it's a minced oath, probably originally referring to US General Winfield Scott....
nurdle
The word nurdle has a variety of definitions; in particular, it's most commonly used to refer to a little squirt of toothpaste, or to refer to small plastic pellets. Edited...
Vocal fry and dismissing young women’s voices
dd { margin-bottom: 20px; } I was completely oblivious to the vocal fry/“creaky voice” phenomenon until today. A friend posted about it, and I did a quick search, and...
sectional (and yak-shaving)
Ah, yak-shaving. I was curious about the use of the word “sectional” in Civil War-era documents; that's not a usage I had encountered before. So here's how looking up a...
Mx
The other day, Mary Anne linked to an article that claimed that the new gender-neutral title “Mx” was being officially added to the OED. I'm not linking to that article...
More recombinant idioms
The following bit from an old Dr Who episode popped into my head this morning: Seventh Doctor: Time and tide melt the snowman. Mel: Doctor, "wait for *no* man." Doctor:...
What They Did II: The Movie Breakup
I've always been fond of my 1997 Words & Stuff post What They Did: The Movie, featuring short, silly, and surreal bits of fiction and drama consisting entirely of movie...
Analyzing Benedict Cumberbatch name variants
Back in December, linguistics grad student Gretchen McCulloch analyzed joke variants on Benedict Cumberbatch's name to see what the underlying patterns are. She gave more statistical detail in a post...
My favorite Unicode character name
My favorite Unicode character name is LATIN SMALL LETTER P WITH SQUIRREL TAIL (U+A755). The character itself is pretty cool too. If you're viewing this page in one of the...